About Advice Column Advice Column (a program of Happiness Adventure) is a nonprofit, 501(C)3. All content is provided as a free service for the public good. Our mission is to create a platform for you and our community to share life-learning with one another. We hope sharing will help you accelerate your growth and remember you aren't alone.
Advice Column - Crowd-Sourced Ideas for Living with Intention
Speaker 1:
You can want them to change, you can positively affect them or negatively affect them, but you cannot change another human being and it's folly to even try.
Speaker 2:
Sometimes what we vision things are going to look like and what they end up looking like are usually not the same.
Speaker 3:
No one is going to come save you. You have to be the person to save yourself.
Speaker 4:
Hello friend, Welcome to Advice Column, where we share crowdsourced ideas for living with intention. In this episode, we're hearing from people what is one of the hardest lessons that they've had to learn in their life, and I liked this topic because it seems like so many times the hardest lessons yield the most wisdom, and so, without further ado, let's just dive right in and hear what our panelists have to say.
Speaker 2:
The hardest lesson that I've ever had to learn was just realizing that sometimes what we vision things are going to look like and what they end up looking like are usually not the same. I got put in the hospital. I spent 70 days there. I was intubated two times, had a trachea, had sepsis it was from COVID and, you know, walked out with my life, which was a miracle. And then the long COVID hit. I walked in the hospital with no medical issues except COVID and walked out with 12 drugs, and so life just became this nine-doctor battle which, you know, I barely had a general practice doctor. We need to learn to pivot, if you will, or adjust ourselves, and so it was just learning how to navigate all that and realize that you have to look at things differently, and I came out having a different vision of what life was going to look like.
Speaker 3:
The hardest lesson I ever had to learn was that no one is going to come save you. You have to be the person to save yourself. And as much as we want to have Superman come save us, as much as we want maybe our parents to come pick us up when we fall, or maybe our spouse, partner, friend to lift us up when we're not doing well. Everyone in life has their own issues and their own problems, and I found that, though sometimes people can't help you, people are dealing with their own baggage, their own termos, their own traumas, and when you are putting your life and most people do put their life first you start to think why me? Why is no one coming to rescue me? And so I had to learn that I had to rescue me.
Speaker 3:
And it wasn't until 2016, when my life was falling apart so quick that I learned that, if I want to get my life on track, I have to take ownership. And so, when I took ownership, everything started to change in my life became a business owner, became a husband, a father, and it just seemed like oh, now things are going my way, but it didn't happen until I took accountability. It didn't happen until I said I need to make the changes that I want to have in my life, not so much waiting for luck, hoping for things to change. I had to be the person to derive the action that I wanted to see in my life. It's not an easy task. It can be very scary, but we do have to take ownership of our life. So the hardest lesson I ever had to learn was that no one was gonna come save me. I had to do it myself.
Speaker 5:
The hardest lesson I've ever had to learn is to fire myself. Listen, I've built three businesses and each time I've gotten to this inflection point where I could either keep doing what I was doing and I could keep moving forward in the business the way that I was moving forward, doing the things that I was good at, the things that I was great at and the things that I was terrible at, or I could get help. I could build a team. And each time, in each of those businesses that I've made the decision to build a team, the business has grown beyond anything that I could have possibly done on my own.
Speaker 5:
And so, yes, it sounds crazy, because, as business owners, we wanna have this closed hand of control over all the things that we're supposed to be doing. We wanna make sure that we have the freedom to do exactly what we wanna do in our business. I'm telling you to open your hand. Let go, fire yourself. Bring alongside people who can do the job better than you, and when you do that, your business will grow beyond you, because I fully believe that your business only grows at the rate of your personal growth, and one of the biggest areas of personal growth that we have to have as business owners is to let go of things that we're no good at so that our business can grow, not without us, not in spite of us, but because of the decisions that we've made.
Speaker 1:
The hardest lesson I've had to learn in my life is you can't change anyone. I had an alcoholic mother and I spent all of my life trying to change her and fix her, and the lesson I learned through all of that that I'm still, I guess, learning in a lot of ways is you can want them to change, you can affect them, you can positively affect them or negatively affect them, but you cannot change another human being, and it's folly to even try.
Speaker 6:
The hardest lesson I've ever learned was to value the people around me that I love my father, a beautiful man. When he died, I wasn't with him. I was the only one in the family that wasn't there and I had so much regret. I regretted not having gotten to know him better. I regretted not knowing things about his life, even when he saved another man's life all these things that I wish I had gotten to know and things that I would like to have shared with him.
Speaker 6:
I repeated the lesson of regret when my mother died unexpectedly. She fell and we expected her to recover, and one thing led to another, I think bad medicine practices at the hospital and before we knew it, she died right before our eyes. And it took me losing two more friends, one of which I'd seen just two days before, and he died in a plane crash. And it made me realize value the people you love and spend time with them and be present with them and enjoy every moment you have with them. I realized it's better to have memories of what was than the regrets of what might have been.
Speaker 7:
The hardest lesson I've ever had to learn is that people will disappoint you and that the best way to get through that is to remember that you are powerful yourself, or, in my case, that I am powerful and that that's just what people do they are not perfect. They will not live up to your expectations and to just accept them as they are. I think if I had realized that when I was a lot younger, I wouldn't have felt so much sadness and disappointment in my daily life with when my expectations weren't met, because expectations can be too high and really unrealistic.
Speaker 8:
Not thinking to ask my mother and father for stories about their lives when they were children and teenagers is the hardest lesson I've had to learn. Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until after they were gone and when I suddenly had so many questions about what made them who they were, which had, of course, influenced me. As an anthropologist, I've always been fascinated by culture change, but I forgot to be curious about the huge culture changes taking place in one or two generations in my own family and I didn't think to talk to my grandparents either. They always focused in true grandparents fashion on me. Now that I have my students interview one of their grandparents as a class project, I can see how much I missed, and I've learned how much older people have to tell us, and asking them and preserving their voices for future generations bring families closer in ways you can't imagine.
Speaker 4:
Those are some beautiful lessons hard won or hard fought for, and I'm very grateful for our panelists for sharing those stories that are so personal with us. When you listen to their stories, what does it spark for you? What is a lesson that you have felt was hard earned in your life that has given you wisdom because of it? I think for me, one of the things that's been slow and difficult for me to learn is the power of forgiveness. Even though theoretically I know how important forgiveness is, it's only when I've had tastes of what it does for me to truly forgive that I've started to really understand its power. So I would say that is one of the hard earned lessons in my life.
Speaker 4:
I am so grateful that you're here on this learning journey with me, and I hope that these episodes help give you ideas and equip you as you journey through your life and just continue to increase in your wisdom and learning. I'd always love to hear from you if there's anything you'd like to share with me or if you have ideas for episodes that would be meaningful for you. The email address is lisa at advicecolumncom. I'll see you in the next episode.
