Do you feel like you’ve made a big mistake? Do you feel like you have taken the wrong path in life? Turns out, that is not a possibility. You only think you are wrong. If you change the way you think about an experience, you can see that while the thing you wanted to happen did not, you probably learned a lot that will help you grow as a person. Here’s an example.
Mariam wanted to work in health care and after taking the basic courses, she decided to be a respiratory therapist. After intensive schooling and a lot of money in tuition, she got a job working in a hospital’s emergency room. She only lasted a week. She found that she wasn’t able to deal with a patient dying on her. In fact, she tried so hard to save every patient, once orderlies had to remove her from a room because she wouldn’t stop trying to save her patient.
What that experience taught her was that she really wanted to help people, but taking care of dying patients was not where she needed to be. Instead, she turned to counselling and with a little more education was able to open a successful practice. Did she see her training as a respiratory therapist as a mistake? No, it was a learning experience. A very expensive one, she would often quip. But afterward, she better understood where she could do the most good.