Always
The Same Lesson?
by Chérie Carter-Scott, Ph.D.
Lessons will repeated to you in
various forms
until you have learned them.
When you have
learned them,
you can then go on to the next lesson.
 Have you ever noticed that lessons
tend to repeat themselves? Does it seem as if you
married or dated the same person several times in
different bodies with different names? Have you run into
the same type of boss over and over again? Do you find
yourself having the same problem with many different
coworkers?
Several years ago, Bill Murray
starred in a movie called Groundhog Day, in which
he woke up in the same day over and over until he
learned all the lessons he needed to in that one day.
The same events kept repeating themselves until he
finally "got" what it was he was supposed to
do in each one. Does this strike a funny but familiar
chord with you?
Lessons will be repeated until
learned. When I taught high school, I always told my
students, "If you don't deal well with authority
figures at home, then you will have an opportunity to
deal with them out in the world. You will continually
draw into your life people who need to enforce
authority, and you will struggle with them until you
learn the lesson of obedience." Teenagers often
perceive their parents as overly strict. At the age of
fourteen, one of my former students went away to
boarding school. Much to her surprise, she found
teachers and staff with the same rules that her mother
had laid down at home and that I had at school. She
finally understood.
In couples' counseling it is often
noted that people who divorce and remarry nearly always
marry the same type of person they just left. Similarly,
a friend of mine named Cassidy who was a compulsive
perfectionist had a knack for attracting inappropriate
men. It was no coincidence that Cassidy, to whom
mismatched socks were a horror and a torn shirt a
federal offense, repeatedly drew men into her life who
dressed like slobs. She was a stickler for manners, yet
her most recent boyfriend held his spoon like Fred
Flintstone wields a drumstick. Only recently did Cassidy
begin to acknowledge that perhaps these men were
appearing in her life as teachers and opportunities to
work out her perfectionist issue.
You will continually attract the same
lesson into your life. You will also draw to you
teachers to teach you that lesson until you get it
right. The only way you can free yourself of difficult
patterns and issues you tend to repeat, is by shifting
your perspective so that you can recognize the patterns
and learn the lessons that they offer. You may try to
avoid the situations, but they will eventually catch up
with you.
To face these challenges means you
need to accept the fact that something within you keeps
drawing you to the same kind of person or issue, painful
though that situation or relationship may be. In the
words of Carl Jung, "There is no coming to
consciousness without pain." And come to
consciousness you must if you are ever to stop repeating
the same lessons and be able to move on to new ones.
The challenge of Rule Four is to
identify and release the patterns that you are
repeating. As any good facilitator or therapist will
tell you, this is no easy task, since it means you have
to change, and change is not always easy. Staying just
as you are may not help you advance spiritually, but it
certainly is comfortable in its familiarity. You grooved
your patterns a long time ago as a way of protecting
yourself. Moving into unfamiliar new behavior can be
uncomfortable not to mention at times frightening.
Rising to the challenge of
identifying and releasing your patterns forces you to
admit that the way you have been doing things isn't
working. The good news is that by identifying and
releasing the pattern, you actually learn how to change.
In my seminars, I teach that there
are six basic steps to executing any change in your
life. They are:
-
awareness -- becoming conscious
of the pattern or issue
-
acknowledgment -- admitting
that you need to release the pattern
-
choice -- actively selecting to
release the pattern
- strategy -- creating a realistic plan
- commitment -- taking action, aided by
external accountability
- celebration -- rewarding yourself for
succeeding
No lasting change can be made, nor any pattern
released permanently, without going through each one of
these steps. In order to facilitate your process of
change, you will need to learn the lessons of awareness,
willingness, causality, and patience. Once you master
these, you will most likely find the challenge of
identifying and releasing your patterns far less
intimidating.
This
article was
excerpted from
If Life is a Game, These
are the Rules - Ten Rules for Being Human
by Chérie Carter-Scott, Ph.D.
Info/Order this book.
About The
Author
Chérie Carter-Scott, Ph.D., author of the bestselling "Negaholics",
is a corporate trainer and management consultant. As chairperson of the
Motivation Management Service Institute, she has worked with over 200,000
people worldwide, leading seminars on self-esteem, communication and
leadership skills, and team building. This article was excerpted with
permission from her book "If Life is a Game, These are the
Rules", published by Broadway Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. The author's website is
http://www.drcherie.com
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