Tapping Your Inner Wisdom

You have heard it said many times, “We learn from experience.” Well, we don’t. If we learned from experience, we would not keep making the same mistakes.

You may know someone who has been at the same job for ten years. Yet that person describes performing the role in the same way as it was performed a decade ago. That individual does not have ten years of experience at the job but merely one year of experience repeated ten times.

We do not learn by simply having experiences. To learn, we must reflect upon our experiences. Too many of us live life in a semi-comatose state. We interact with others and our environment. If a situation turns out in our favor, we credit it to luck. If circumstances turn against us, we bemoan our fate.

To live life fully, we must live consciously. We need to continually review our thoughts, behaviors, and results. We need to determine what is helping us to reach our goals and to express our values. Those are the actions and attitudes we want to reinforce. When we find thoughts or behaviors that create negative outcomes, we need to take the initiative to think and act in more positive ways.

A helpful exercise is to review your day before retiring each night. Identify your accomplishments for the day. Congratulate yourself on your successes, no matter how small they may seem to you. Determine what you did that contributed to the positive outcomes so you can reinforce those behaviors. Review what you want to do differently. Decide what actions might bring you more positive results in the future. This simple daily exercise is one way you can tap your inner wisdom.