Just 14 things I've learned along the way
1. The wrong person can destroy your life, while the right one can enhance it – choose wisely and be careful who you open up to, not everyone has your best interests at heart.
2. What begins fast – ends fast, be patient and observant. People rarely change, what you see after the honeymoon period is usually who they are at their core.
3. Always be yourself and never take on another role to impress anyone, nor over analyze what you should do or say. Not everyone will like you and well that’s life. You may be humble and they may equate that to you being soft. You may be confident and they may equate that with being arrogant. You may be a good person to the core and they may equate that with being safe and boring. If someone does not like you for who you are well there is someone out there who will.
4. Never give away your feelings, love, and commitment cheaply. Respect paves the way for love. And without respect, there is no solid foundation for love or commitment.
5. Have standards, boundaries and a high level of self-confidence. When you have vigorous levels of confidence it’s like a domino effect that encouragingly stimulates every part of your inner composition. From your self-esteem, thought process, success in life and right down to relationships all benefit from self-confidence. However deficiency of self-confidence will keep you from maintaining beneficial boundaries. This in turn will lead to individuals overrunning the line in the sand so to speak over and over again losing all forms of respect they have for you. People who don’t revere your boundaries don’t truly love or respect you.
6. When someone traverses your boundaries, disappoints, frustrates or makes you enraged, if you reciprocate with anger you have handed over power of your emotions to them. When you counter without reacting (indifference) you are indicating that you are in total control and are not going to relinquish control of your emotions to someone else. It rarely pays to confront, be angry, or pour out your soul. You’ll never get the answer or reaction you are seeking, just drama, lies, trickle truthing, deflections, blame-shifting, and vilifying of you to justify their actions.
7. Relationships take a lot of work. Every day brings forth new challenges and emotions. You have to learn to pick your battles, and compromise in certain areas to make it succeed. Successful, long-lasting relationships are not built on sexual attraction.
8. Love and Relationships are indeterminate and they have no assurances. You may get cheated on, manipulated, lied to, fall out of love, drift apart or it may be the best experience of your life. No one can predict the future but you can either live in trepidation or give it a go, hope you did your due diligence and try to make the best of it.
9. Actions over words, people will always tell you what you want to hear to calm any fears. Always trust your gut feeling, if you feel something is not right – more than likely you are correct. Never think it can’t happen to you.
10. Without any consequences, bad behavior will continue to persist. When it is time to walk away, never wait and never look back. You may receive a big jolt of pain all at once but if you stay you get it little by little; day after day. Never accept demotion, breadcrumbs, nor cling to anything (words, individuals) – move on and enrich yourself. Never let anyone pick you up and throw you aside and pick you up and throw you aside whenever it suits them, if you have no self respect no one will respect you.
11. Recognize that breakups happen for an array of reasons and one of the main reasons is that somewhere out there is someone more suitable for you. So don’t impede the process in locating them by trying to recapture a relationship with an individual who isn’t right for you. Neuter the feelings that you never will get over your ex because it is all an illusion. So hope for peace in the world, hope for an end to bigotry, hope for the end of world hunger, but never hope for a person who no longer values you or loves you to come back in your life.
12. Don’t give into bitterness. It will seek to control you and eat away at your happiness. Reclaim your self-
respect and individual power. Learn from your mistakes and you’ll become a better person. Just remember that anything and everything is possible when you re-identify yourself. Make peace with the situation and accept it for what it was. Great things seem to happen if you have a positive mindset when you least expect it. So work on remaking yourself into a better person. The person you always wanted to be.
13. The path to absolute recovery is not a horizontal line, there will be ups and downs, left turns and right turns, step forwards and step backs. However in all things there is a lesson and in this you can learn the process of letting go and moving forward in life. You should never be reliant upon anyone else to bring happiness into your life. Since the day I finally came to the realization and understanding that I have no control over someone loving me, valuing me, respecting me or not – life has been so seamless. Why worry about things you can’t change its better to focus on the areas you can change and control, your thoughts, your happiness and your life.
14. Patience it’s not the end, everything in life teaches a valuable lesson. You can carry around baggage and be emotional unstable and lack empathy or you can take the viewpoint of being better prepared, wiser, stronger and realize life throws battles at everyone, you can’t win them all but you can win the war.
. They ease up after that.
