May God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
We’ve all been told our entire lives that there are some things we can control and others that we can’t control.
We can control our activity. We can control our nutrition. We can control what information we consume.
We can’t control the weather. We can’t control random accidents and disasters.
We can’t control things that are happening on the other side of the world that we never even find out about until after they’re already long over.
These are the events of our lives, and as we all know, the events are not the story.
We also don’t control other people’s responses, thoughts, and emotions despite whether they might try to make us believe that we do.
Other people might blame us for their responses, thoughts, and emotions.
There is one thing that we always control—the way we respond.
We respond to everything that happens to us and everything that we ever find out about. We respond to everything that enters our awareness.
We always control the way we response—always.
No one makes anyone else respond a certain way. One person’s reactions and emotions never dictate the reactions and emotions of another person.
Say someone cuts me off in traffic. That’s an event. I have no control over what the other driver did.
I always control the way I respond.
I could choose to completely fly off the handle. I could yell at the other driver, shoot him the middle finger from my window, and spend the rest of the day fuming about how inconsiderate he is.
I could instead respond by shrugging it off, forgetting about it, and focusing on all the much more important things I have to do today.
The other driver never entered the equation to determine my response. He acted the same way in both scenarios.
How I responded was entirely under my control at all times.
We don’t always control the events.
We always control our response—and here’s the most important thing.
Our response to the events will determine the outcome.
Say that driver cut me off and we got in a wreck that paralyzed me or one of my children.
I could choose to give up on life, waste away in a void of self-pity, and spend the rest of my life hating him and letting that hate eat away at me from the inside.
Or I could choose to bounce back and make the best of the life I have left.
I might not become a marathon runner, but maybe there’s another outcome waiting for me that would be even better and more fulfilling.
Australian pastor Nick Vujicic was born without arms or legs. He spent years depressed and resenting God for giving him such a terrible affliction.
Now he embraces his situation as the vehicle that has given him the platform to change other people’s lives and communicate his message of hope to the world.
Australian exercise physiologist Drew Harrisberg thought he was getting a death sentence when he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
Drew later became famous when he wrote a letter to his diabetes thanking it for all the wonderful changes it had brought to his life.
It made him healthier, happier, and more fulfilled.
It also gave him both the empathy and audience to build a global platform to touch other people’s lives. His diabetes allowed him to help other people in ways he wouldn’t have been able to if he never received that diagnosis.
We will always experience events beyond our control. Our response will always determine the outcome and our response is always under our control—therefore, we always control the outcome.
Remember that the next time you feel stressed, overwhelmed, depressed, or hopeless.
You control everything that happens to you. You always control the outcome of everything that happens to you. You control it through your response.
I spent decades living behind the eight-ball and getting knocked around from one life disaster to another.
A series of changes occurred in my life that brought me to where I am today.
When my publishing contract ended in January 2024, my very first thought was, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
And I was right. I was right because I turned what could have been a disaster into the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
Within a few hours of making the decision to pull out of the contract, I created a plan that to skyrocket my publishing to something far beyond what that contract could have given me.
This was the third time I had the same response to what could have been life-destroying events.
The first was when I separated from my children’s father. The second was the end of another long-term relationship.
I was married to my children’s father for eleven years before that marriage came to an end.
The breakup was absolutely fantastic for me. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.
I made a list of everything I wanted in my new living situation and I got everything I asked for.
When I took my kids and moved out of the house into a new place, I thought, “This is going to be great. My life is going to get so much better after this.” And it did.
My life became exponentially better as soon as the relationship ended.
When I initiated the breakup of the other relationship, I also thought, “This is going to be the best thing for both of us.”
It wasn’t easy. None of those events was easy to go through.
These three experiences taught me something. I wasn’t thinking about this before. It happened three times one right after the other for me to learn this lesson.
From now on, no matter what happens, tell yourself, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
You might not see how that’s possible right now, but ten or twenty years from now—if you play your cards right—you could get yourself somewhere so much better that you wouldn’t have gotten had you stayed where you are right now.
Whatever you’re going through right now will be the best thing that has ever happened to you because you’ll make it that way.
If you respond to this event by embracing it as the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll be in the best possible position to launch yourself into whatever opportunity is coming into your life. It will lead you down the other road—the better road.
One thing is guaranteed.
If you tell yourself this is the greatest disaster of your life and that it will destroy you, it will. You’ll find a way to let it destroy you.
You’ll give yourself permission to fall apart instead of taking a leap into something new—something that might have been the greatest opportunity of your life.
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