The Good In The Bad

Welcome to Format Free Fridays at AskDrDarcy.com, the one day a week when I break the format of answering your questions and I dispense that which we rarely welcome in life: Unsolicited advice.

Bad people suck.  They make life unnecessarily unpleasant and having to deal with them is typically the driving force behind why people seek out a shrink.

Other than being related to a bad person, the next worse thing is having to work for one.  Probably a third of the stories that I hear are about mean bosses.  And I always find myself reflecting on my own experiences of working with challenging bosses.  Very early in my career I decided that I’d rather starve than have my livelihood be contingent on a stranger finding me valuable (the irony is not lost on me that now my livelihood is contingent on 30 strangers finding me valuable), and so I embarked on becoming an entrepreneur.  But often I wonder if I bailed out too soon. Did I fail to see the lessons in negative experiences?

It is my belief that we can learn from every person and from every situation in life.  People either inspire me to be better than I am or they provide a warning of what I don’t want to become. Either way, there is no such thing as a worthless experience ~ or a worthless person.  But there are such things as missed learning opportunities.

Reflect on the most challenging area of your life.  I’m sure that there is a culprit ~ someone whose fault you’ve decided it is that this area isn’t what you imagined it would be.  Now ask yourself what the lesson is that you’re meant to learn.  The lesson has to do with you – not the culprit.  Your life is a course.  What did you learn in today’s class?