Life — A reflection of what we allow ourselves to see

The title of this blog is pretty much self-explanatory. Most of the time in life, we assume a lot of things and those assumptions affect the way we see things in life, the way we deal with different situations. But is it okay to assume stuff about people? If it is, then we better assume something positive. Because this was the mistake that I had been repeating in life and it had affected a lot of things in drastic ways. I was negative in my approach.

So this problem has been affecting me for a long time. Whenever something happened, I was always jumping up to negativity. Whether it was working with different classmates, or it was dealing with their different behaviors and personalities. This negative energy was so toxic that it affected my mental peace of mind. It made me bad at teamwork. It affected my communication skills. I had no confidence. I was all alone at my university.

Whenever there was a personality clash with someone, despite thinking whether the other person is thinking, my thought process always used to be like “Oh, this person is trying to make a personal attack on me” This fixed mindset didn’t allow me to grow at all. And this was the reason I came to Amal Academy, to improve my interpersonal skills.

Now let’s come to the incident that had a profound effect on me. It is a pretty small incident though, but it’s often small things like these that cause a larger butterfly effect. I asked my Program Manager Ma’am Zeest about this problem that I was facing. And she answered the questions along the lines of “If you are working with someone and this particular person’s behavior is toxic. But the value that person is adding to the work that you are doing is great, you can learn to co-exist with them.”

To be honest it was something ordinary. But it caused a butterfly effect in the mindset that I had. In the next two months, I dealt with many situations in which I was facing the same old conditions. I was facing people who had different personalities than me. But rather than thinking about that, I focused on how I can deal with this issue and how I can co-exist with them. I focused more on the work they were doing. I just dealt with the situations with a little positivity. The results were amazing.

This little positivity not only made my life easier, it showed me a new angle of life. It caused a complete paradigm shift to my thought process. I now took things more positively. I communicated with these different people to know what their thought process was and how they felt about things. It helped me to know them better and I realized that most of these people never deliberately tried to hurt me, it was just my negative and fixed mindset that was a wall between me and these people.

Now fast-forward to two months, my life is much more different. Now, this different attitude has made my learning experience in class much better and now I can connect with my classmates and friends. There is no wall of negativity between us.

Looking back, I would have done a lot of things differently. Like I would be more positive to how I approached people and how I perceived things. If I had only allowed myself to see a better reflection of people, life would be wonderful. I would also have tried to communicate with people better. Because most of the time it is the communication gap that causes lots of rifts. I wouldn’t say that the pessimistic attitude in my has completely changed. It is still something that I am changing. I am always forcing myself to see things in a positive light. Because life is only a reflection of what we allow ourselves to see.