Psychology I Learn Through My Life

Psychology I learn through my Life

The series of articles I propose to write under this heading are not any kind of Philosophical or theoretically psychological but it is clearly experiential. To explain this I will take help of a saying (I am not good at remembering who said what, anyways the saying is important than who said it.)

Life is a difficult teacher,
It tests you first and then gives you a lesson.

Now that’s what I would be writing. The lessons I learn after giving the tests of life. Again its not something very serious or unusual experiences of my life but very normal and usual situations and experiences that have some meaning behind their existence.

I have been learning psychology for almost seven to eight years. I love reading different books that deal with psychology and one of my favorite books is my diary that teaches me psychology better than anything else. I have the habit of writing about people I meet, experiences, situations etc. I come across everyday and then I wait for a while and try to seek the reasons for that particular situation and experience and I must tell you I learn wonderful lessons from it. Lessons that direct my future behavior.

One of the things I was very good at as a kid, most of the kids are, was “Give Reasons” well it’s not about something that is related to the academic syllabus but something related to my behavior. I was very good at giving reasons to anything that happened with me. I remember a very common incidence at my home every time I got my progress card (though there wasn’t any progress on the card every time it was given to me). The moment I reached home, I used to go to my room directly without saying anything to anybody and start completing my home work, reciting poems, tables, reading lessons loudly (loudly because I wanted to tell everyone that I am studying very sincerely). Then my father used to enter the room, knowing my drama very well, “Baba I got my progress card today, I am sorry, but the papers were very difficult, and our teacher didn’t teach us well, yes! I was not well before the exam, and nobody gave me their notes.” “That’s not my fault actually it happened because….”. I never took the responsibility of my actions or results and always reasoned it with some external faults. It was not just about giving reasons but it was also about not taking responsibility of my life and I always tried to give it to somebody else and thus never improved, developed and never changed the conditions nor my progress card.

Fortunately my Baba never listened to any reasons. His patent sentence to my reasons was, “Don’t give me any reason. Accept what you have done.” It took a lot of years for me to accept that, but I am happy I finally got that. Finally I took the responsibility whereby I became accountable to my success, failures, and decisions whether right or wrong, mistakes, etc. Now that I had been through both the experiences I know that taking responsibility of my life is so empowering which means once you take the responsibility you can even change the situation and giving that responsibility to others is limiting, where you cannot do anything unless others do it. I made a choice to take my responsibility and similarly the decision to give responsibility to somebody else was also my choice. In both the phases I made the choice and thus I was responsible for the condition of my life in both the phases.

Lesson 1: You are responsible for the condition of your Life.

Take responsibility to change the condition do not wait for any external miracle to happen. Accept the condition, take responsibility, and find out ways to change the condition. Situation is not in your control but your response to that situation is within your control, there is a choice for you: take the responsibility to change the condition or run away from the situation.

One very good example to explain Lesson 1 is the film, which released this year, which was appreciated by one and all, “Lage raho Munnabhai”. Gandhigiri that I understood through the film is taking responsibility to change the condition and therefore being responsible for the condition of our life.