Featured Guest Blogger: William Merunka
Follow me on my journey to become a great engineer.
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Life is a journey, and sometimes during our journey we hit dark, murky territory that seems frightening. Sometimes it leads to other tough terrain that we struggle through, and other times it leads to a beautiful, illuminated open area. Either way it is all a part of the journey of life.
On this journey through life, we learn a lot of lessons that helps us develop as individuals as well as prepare us for our future adventures. Sometimes these lessons make a powerful impact on our life, and it is hard to forget about the benefits and consequences that resulted from these lessons. In these cases, when we encounter similar situations, we automatically think back to when we first encountered this kind of situation and how the event turned out. Other times, the lesson is often forgotten about and you may not recall it until you are in the situation again and it is too late to alter your actions to obtain a positive outcome. When we realize that we have been down the same road in the past, we often get mad at ourselves for not learning from our past and letting ourselves go down the same road again even though we promised ourselves that we would not let it happen again.
While this lack of learning from past experiences may seem to happen often and be unchangeable, it is not. There are ways that you can increase the positive learning experience from even the worse situation you ever encountered. One valuable method is to reflect on your experiences after you go through them. Think about the way you confronted the problem. Did your method resolve the issue? Was it the only way to solve the problem, or were there other possible solutions? This process can be done for positive and negative outcomes.
When reflecting on your experiences, it is important to also document the findings. If you just think about the journey, but not document it, it is easy to forget about the experience, and your evaluation process would not reach its full potential. These evaluations should be kept in a single book so that you can easily find the information as opposed to looking through various scrap papers to find what you are looking for. When you make your book, you should review it on a regular basis so that you would be able to identify the situation the next time it happened before it was too late.
Self evaluation is an important step to becoming successful in your career. Without self-evaluation, roads will constantly be dark and murky as opposed to bright and easy to navigate.
What are some ways that you learn from your life experiences? Do you have a daily or weekly routine that you follow?
