I believe we take birth for two reasons –

• To touch lives of others and make this world a beautiful place in our own little way
• To allow this world to touch us so that we learn our own life lessons and become beautiful inside out.

Since we don’t learn anything to perfection the very first time, the life lessons keep repeating themselves – till we learn them right in theory and then, till we master them practically.

We all have our own unique set of life lessons to learn. But it is still good to learn from those that others have had. So here are a few lessons I have learnt and am still learning, have mastered (hopefully) and am still practicing …

On Life

You get to live life just once. So live it the way you want to. Test your theories. Follow your intuition. Go ahead even if you doubt yourself. You will make mistakes this way. A lot of mistakes. But mistakes are good. Especially if you are making them in your life. So make your decisions and own your mistakes. That’s how you learn, that’s how you grow. That’s the only way for you to live life on your own terms. If you are too scared to make mistakes, you remain stuck wherever you are. And since life moves forward and you remain stuck, you are actually moving backwards.

On Your Most Important Relationship

Your first and most important relationship is with you. Love yourself, be honest with yourself, take care of yourself and be kind to yourself. Be your own very best friend. If you are not with you, you could have everything possible in the world but still feel empty, lonely and incomplete from within.

On Happiness

When one door to happiness closes, another opens. If no doors open, break the wall and create your own door.

If you miss the door which opened, it’s because you stubbornly want the happiness behind the door which is no more open for you.

If no doors open, don’t sit waiting for a door to open. Unless you like that kind of external dependency on something as important as your own happiness. Take matters in your hand. Take your happiness in your hand. And you will never ever have to worry about ‘doors to happiness’ again.

On Sadness

Being sad is all right. It really is. So is being angry, frustrated, worried etc. You can’t choose to feel positive emotions all the time. If you feel negative emotions, remember it’s normal. And anyways, the question is not whether you can feel them or not; the question is what will you do with these emotions and for how long are you willing to feel them?

On Success

Success is such a relative term. You could be doing only one thing right and still feel successful or you could excel in 100 things and still feel like a failure. It all depends upon what are you aiming for and what are you judging yourself against.

When it comes to success, a question worth answering is – What will it take for you to feel successful? When you jot down all the nitty-gritty details of when will you call yourself a success, you might be surprised. You might be surprised how incredibly unfair your answer is. If your friend had answered what you just answered, you might whack her to bring her back to her senses.

On Spirituality

God / angels / nature / masters … whomever you believe in are always connected to you. They are with you 24*7 whether you are with them or not. But when you take time to connect with them, life somehow seems simpler and happier. Soul/Spirit feels nourished and joyous and at home.

Some Random Lessons

• When life doesn’t go as planned, remember, you couldn’t have planned it better. You would not have been able to put in as many new experiences, as many adventures and as many life changing scenarios if you were to plan your life. Stop your struggle. Make most of what’s happening, make most of your journey and see where does it lead you.
• When it comes to emotions, decisions are either made out of fear or out of love. Decisions made out of fear usually don’t work.
• Listen to your inner voice even if logically it doesn’t make sense, even if the message is not what you want to hear.
• When you aren’t sure what’s your priority, think what would you like to answer to ‘What did you do this year?’. Play out different answers in mind. And you will figure out what’s truly important to you.

Note: Abubakar Jamil has started a Life Lessons Series project. This article is my submission to the same. To read more submissions by other bloggers, follow the link.

My Life Lessons In A Nutshell is a post from: Avani-Mehta.com Download & Share: The Fabulous Motivators E-Book.

Continuing from where we left off …

Second Lesson:

The first week of C25K consists of walking 5 minutes in the beginning and alternating 1 minute jogging with 1.30 minutes walking for 20 minutes (for all three days). Yeah, that’s total of 8 minutes of jogging in a span of 25 minutes.

First day was like a breeze. Because of the time I had given to building strength, this run was easy for me. Finally I could run. Even though it was just a minute at a time … it was eight minutes in all. That got to count for something. I was elated. Excited. I felt strong and powerful. I wanted to repeat the experience.

I thought of doing this run every day rather than every alternate day as suggested. This is natural. You find you are good at something, you want to do more of it. And then when you have a worthy goal, you are ready to push and bear anything. You just want to reach your goal … faster.

Bad idea. At the fifth run, my knee started complaining. I did complete the run but with some difficulty. My knee became a cause of concern. As I searched online, I found what I already knew – you are not supposed to run hard everyday. It puts a strain on your body and will cause injury. Even those who run everyday, alternate their runs with hard and easy.

Balancing hard runs with rest is important, else your body won’t be able to take those runs any longer. Balancing hard runs with rest is the key to build endurance and run long distance and time.

Balance. Why do we keep forgetting about this simple little concept? We take good things in our life for granted and stretch them beyond their capacity. What makes us think that they wont snap and break?

It’s not just our body that I am talking about here – you know that. It’s the same with our relationships and our mental strength. Why does it take the first sign of crack to stop us from doing what we are doing and start doing the right thing? Don’t we know that any crack, any injury means that we went too far – We didn’t just stretch, we actually damaged the good thing in our life.

Hard runs & rest. Isn’t that what the path to success is all about? You work hard to get what you want. You step back to rest & relax. Without putting in required effort, success is not possible. Without rest, success is short lived.

Food For Mind:

• Our body can take lot of hits. Do you stretch it beyond it’s capacity – do you work yourself till you fall sick?
• What comes easily to you – working hard or resting? How can you balance both?
• Sometimes we stretch ourselves too thin. Do you need to take better care of yourself?
• To wait till our body complains/gets injured seems to be a stupid way to judge how far we can go. Where else do we do this?
• Do you take for granted that if there is no fighting or complaining, you are doing everything right in your relationship? Do you wait for the first sign of crack to appear?
• When people snap fast – with irritation, impatience or anger, does it mean that they are cracking and need rest – does it mean that they are due for some care?

Take Home:

• Working hard is not enough. Resting is also important. Path to success is long … work hard and then rest hard.
• Don’t take advantage of the capacity to stretch. Don’t give any reason for a crack to appear anywhere in your life.
• When we start something new in our life, it is easy to get carried away. In our enthusiasm and excitement, it is easy to forget that we need some resting period as well. Remember to pause after working hard.

What did you take home from this?

For those who are interested, here’s the link to The Couch To 5K Running Plan.

Life Lessons From My Running Experiences – Part II is a post from: Avani-Mehta.com Download & Share: The Fabulous Motivators E-Book.

I don’t like running. Never have. This probably has to do with the fact that every time I run, I feel as if my heart is going to plop out. Heartbeats running fast, without pausing, without breathing; weaken me, make me dizzy. I can run but I severely dislike the breathless powerless feeling it leaves me with. Ask me to dance all day, walk all day, work all day and I will be ready for it that very instant. Running … bah! that doesn’t interest me.

But I wondered how would it be to run for 30 minutes at a stretch. How would it feel to be free, to fly – as those who run describe it. How would the runner’s high feel? How would the euphoria feel?

Curiosity, that’s the only reason why I picked running. I was curious about the experience of it. And I didn’t just want to wonder about running, I wanted to know.

The Couch-To-5k Running Plan

Every time I tried running, success elated me and failure pushed me back to frustration and strengthened my dislike for running. And then, I found C25K aka The Couch-To-5K running plan.

C25k has helped thousands of beginners to run 3 miles or 30 minutes in a span of 9 weeks (3.1 miles = 5 kilometers; hence 5k) . You give 30 minutes 3 days a week to this plan and within 2 months you would be running as promised. I looked at the plan – each day’s walking/running schedule given in detail – easy in the beginning and difficulty increasing a little each day/week. It looked tough but doable. Only 3 days a week for 2 months; I thought yeah, I could try this plan.

Life Lessons From My Running Experiences

As each running day went by, I realized that running is more than just a physical activity. For completing each run I have to use principles of living. Sometimes I learn from my runs some important lessons on living as well. Soon lessons on running better started influencing my life and lessons on living better started influencing my runs. To the point that I realized they both are the same – lessons on running or lessons on living … same thing.

First Lesson:

I was on treadmill. Walking as fast I could. Trying to build my stamina and strengthen my muscles. I wanted to run at least a minute at a stretch. That’s how much you need to be able to run on first week of C25k. Hence I was working on that. Diligently. And then on the treadmill next to mine a guy hopped in. And he ran double my speed. I thought it’s a sprint. He will soon stop. He kept going.

I thought o.k., it seems he must be running for a long time. But once I complete my C25k plan, I might be able to run this long, this fast as well. He increased his speed. Double my speed was his base running speed. Around triple my speed was his max running speed (could be more I don’t know).

I wanted to give in then. That very minute. I got too self conscious as I compared my speed and capacity to his. There is no way I could be as good as him I thought. My speed (read I) must seem lousy to him I thought. I felt miserable.

And then I caught myself doing this. And thought whoa! what am I doing? Just because some guy raced past me, I am thinking of quitting! Just because someone is way better than me, I am feeling bad about myself. That’s not me. And that doesn’t make sense at all.

I decided that moment to take inspiration from this comparison rather than get discouraged. This incident became an additional source of motivation for me. I aspire to run like him one day – run hard and fast and with ease (and may be race past someone like me someday ).

Food For Mind:

• Has someone raced past you in life? How did it make you feel? And what did you do about it?
• Do you drop the activity that you are learning if you realize you might not be as good as someone else?
• Getting discouraged and getting inspired – both seem to be choices we can make from the same situation. Can you look back at a discouraging incident and turn it to an inspiring one?
• Comparisons are bound to happen. How do they affect you?
• Is there anything you don’t do or stopped doing because you were conscious of what others would think of you or how bad you are at it?
• What will you do differently if you know people aren’t going to judge you?

Take Home:

• That someone is better than you in some way, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t reflect on who you are at all.
• When you find someone better than you, get inspired not demotivated.
• Every incident which puts you down, can also lift you up – it’s a matter of perspective.
• If you think you are that important that people are going to notice everything you do and they will talk and think about it, you are sadly mistaken.
• What you do is none of other people’s business, what they think about you, is none of yours as well.

Next lesson coming soon. Would love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Life Lessons From My Running Experiences – Part I is a post from: Avani-Mehta.com Download & Share: The Fabulous Motivators E-Book.