Blaming the world for what is not going
right and praising ourselves for what is going right, is something we Indians
have learned from our childhood days.
When you were a very small kid, somewhere
between the toddling and running stage, if at anytime you fell down and cried,
your mother would have picked you up, comforted you and in order to pacify you
and stop you from crying, she would have acted as if she was beating the floor
on which you tripped, twice or thrice, saying that “I have beaten the floor,
now you don’t cry”. Somewhere deep in our mind a message was engrained that
tripping down was not our fault, but the fault of the floor. Because the floor
was punished, when actually we did the mistake of running carelessly, our mind
learned whatever happens to us, is a plot of a external force and not our own
mistake. This act of dis-owning our
mistakes keep continuing in our growth stage as well.
For example, while we are walking and we
accidentally stamped over a thorn, we would say, “the thorn pricked me” whereas
a English man would say, “I ran over a thorn”. Just think of it. Is it not true?.
A few more similar examples:
When we miss a train, we brood “the train
left before I arrived” rather than saying “I was late to catch the train”.
When our shirt does not fit, we say “the
shirt has become short”, instead of saying “I have outgrown the shirt”.
When a pen slips from your hand, we say
“the pen fell down” instead of “I dropped the pen”
These are just few of the many wrong
statements we use in our day to day life. These communication patterns which we
form unconsciously, affects the way we perceive life and our life situations.
This has invisibly affected our growth and
success rate in our life. As we tend, to justify our failures, by blaming the
external situations, we don’t genuinely try to understand what really went
wrong, when we face a failure. Unless we develop a unbiased view and try to
figure out, what went wrong, we cannot find a positive solution to the problem.
The problem will keep repeating again and again.
Robin Sharma, in his book “The Saint, the
Surfer and the CEO” gives a very thought provoking statement which goes like
this. “Life is a growth school. Everything that happens in your life, happens
for a reason and there is some lesson that life is trying to teach you. We need
to quickly learn the lesson, failing which life will continue to bring the same
problem again and again until you have learned the lesson.”
It is time we learn to own responsibility,
for our mistakes. It is only by owning our mistakes, we can change for the
better. It will give us a opportunity to assess where and how we went wrong,
and give us a o positive way ahead plan. Because in the end of the day, what
the world will count is not the number you’re your excuses but the amount of
your achievement.
Happy Reading
D.Senthil Kannan
Article dated Aug'08
