And in fact this happens a lot with a lot of situations - people forget (including me!) that very little “happens to us” without our input. (Obviously some things are totally out of our control, but I’d argue less than we might think.)
This reminds me of a kid I met years ago. He always seemed to be in some bad situation or another - a personal injury lawsuit, a fight with a client, a fight with a boss, etc. He always framed it as bad luck - lots of bad things just happened to him and he was pretty melancholy about his lot in life.
It wasn’t until I spent a week with him on a group trip that I got some more perspective - he made a lot of bad decisions. If someone called him a name, he wouldn’t walk away - he went in and started yelling (made the personal injury lawsuit make more sense). If one of his clients had a request, he didn’t just adjust - he fought back and argued.
The whole thing was eye opening for me. It wasn’t that bad things happened to him - it was that he regularly made choices that put him on a path to bad things happening. He just never quite realized that and, of course, never reported those parts of the story.
And in fact this happens a lot with a lot of situations - people forget (including me!) that very little “happens to us” without our input. (Obviously some things are totally out of our control, but I’d argue less than we might think.)
This reminds me of a kid I met years ago. He always seemed to be in some bad situation or another - a personal injury lawsuit, a fight with a client, a fight with a boss, etc. He always framed it as bad luck - lots of bad things just happened to him and he was pretty melancholy about his lot in life.
It wasn’t until I spent a week with him on a group trip that I got some more perspective - he made a lot of bad decisions. If someone called him a name, he wouldn’t walk away - he went in and started yelling (made the personal injury lawsuit make more sense). If one of his clients had a request, he didn’t just adjust - he fought back and argued.
The whole thing was eye opening for me. It wasn’t that bad things happened to him - it was that he regularly made choices that put him on a path to bad things happening. He just never quite realized that and, of course, never reported those parts of the story.