A couple of years ago, I took part in a coaching workshop named ’A photo album’, in which we had a task to create our own old photo album and imagine that our grandchildren would find it one day in our dusty basement. We had a task to fill it up with the images from our lives. I was sitting in that workshop for almost two hours in complete silence and I was barely able to draw at least one image. I simply had no idea what to put in it.

If we look at the goal of this workshop, I should have had clear images in the end, representing my life achievements, goals and ambitions. I should have had a vision of my life. But I simply had nothing. Was this exercise a failure for me, or not?

“THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS FAILURE,
THERE’S ONLY A RESULT”

One of the principles of NLP says: “Neuspeh ne postoji – postoji samo rezultat”. ‘There’s no such thing as failure, there’s only a result.’ Success is a result of experience. Experience is a result of repeating a certain process or action. Repeating is a result that we often regard as a failure.

What result have I achieved then? When I take a look at my experience, perhaps the workshop itself didn’t help me find the answers to my questions, but I have come to realize that, despite all the things in my life seemed to be just right (I graduated, I had a girlfriend and I had a job I loved), I still didn’t have even the faintest idea what I want from my life, and that was really important to me. Perhaps I didn’t get the answers, but I got the energy and motivation to work on myself for a long time after that conclusion. That realization was huge for me.

PEOPLE ALREADY HAVE ALL THE RESOURCES
THEY NEED IN ORDER TO MAKE A CHANGE

‘People already have all the resources they need in order to make a change’. – I love this principle! It tells us that solutions for all the challenges we are facing are already inside of us, as well as all the resources necessary for us to make them happen.

In that time, I was doing a job I had previously fantasized about for a long time. I was working in a global company, in an HR sector, with many opportunities for personal development and learning, with great boss and a great team, and that was everything I have ever wanted from a corporation. In addition, I became great in my job.

I noticed people looking at me in a different way, I noticed my parents proudly talking about me to the rest of our family and friends and what kind of a social status that job provided to me. I was feeling great and I certainly enjoyed all the attention. But the longer I was working there, the more I was having that inner feeling telling me that I had so much more to offer to the world, something more that needs to be done, which is much above everything I have previously accomplished and that I already knew how to do. I started feeling that I wasn’t living in accordance with my purpose. I decided to quit my job and do something about it.[/ezcol_3quarter_end]

GETTING OUT OF THE COMFORT ZONE

Terrifying feeling. Abandoning everything familiar to you and getting out of the comfort zone, straight into the unfamiliar, that is something I have never done before. It’s exactly there, in the moment of getting out from our comfort zone, when our whole body is dragging us back into the routine and what is familiar and where we are completely safe – that is the biggest space for learning that you can imagine. It’s only important to discover what it is that really matters to us and that is worth our effort. Bottom line – how can you know if you never try? It is about the experience, step by step, that is all that takes, because no matter how slow you move, we are actually going much faster than when we only stay in one spot. If we want to be better in anything, it’s good to make experiments with our minds open, trying and even failing, but learning from such result.