There are areas in every persons life where we feel skilled. At home. We know what to do, how to handle challenges, how to grow, or just to stay on top of it and avoid mistakes. It’s a different area for different people, and it’s a mixture of personality traits, things we learned from our parents, or life, and things that just felt natural to us along the way.
For someone it’s music; you just sit down with an instrument and get it. For someone else it’s social interactions; they just love meeting new people and feel so good in every social setting. Others have a feeling for writing, some kind of sport, or design.
Then there are things that we need to learn. That maybe don’t come as naturally to us, or that for some reason no one taught us along the way. Maybe our parents lacked this skill or knowledge too, maybe ww grew up in an environment where other things were more emphasized or maybe we got sick for a long time and missed out on something that is part of most peoples life experience.
Then we can learn. Luckily, we can learn almost anything. But what I often find when I’m coaching, is that a lot of people seem to think that it is somehow unfair, or wrong that they – of all people – have to take this journey of self-discovery, healing and coaching. When it looks so easy for everyone else!
“How come I can’t figure out this dating thing when it’s so obvious to everyone else?”
“Why does this keep happening to me when dating looks so easy breezy to others?”
I know that pain, believe me. I spent years blaming life for being unfair and it wasn’t until way later that I realized that fairness is a quite big order from something as random as life. And I also realized that I wasn’t seeing the world clearly. I completely missed out on the fact that I had other skills and advantages that felt so easy and obvious to me that I couldn’t even grasp the idea that that could be an issue for someone else. All I saw was the things that I lacked and others had.
So even if you may struggle a bit with your love life at the moment, you can create the change that you want, and you also have many other life areas where everything is going great without any struggle or effort. It may be that you have great friends, your good health or that you’ve always known what you’ve wanted to do for work. Appreciate that, and realize that it’s not reasonable to expect that you excel in every area of life automatically.
Lately I have thought a lot about this. Why do we think that something is wrong when we have issues? Isn’t it kind of arrogant to demand that we come into this world fully equipped for every situation in every area without a learning curve? How could we possibly know things we were never taught and didn’t come easy to us?
Isn’t a much better approach to be thankful for the things that did come to us with ease and grace, and then start doing what we can to learn the rest – without making ourselves feel bad about it – and even be grateful for the possibility to learn as well?
So if you bash on yourself because of your love life, please remember that you are not alone, and that you can learn, grow, and take charge of what happens, just like in any other are of your life. And that other people need to make an effort to create what they want in other areas where things have always been working for you.