Our lives are filled with endless experiences and choices that shape who we are as people. Each and every experience in your life is another chance for you to change and grow. But how do these experiences shape us?
Some make us more trusting, while others lead us to be more weary of those around us.
Some make us more generous to others, while others can help us be kinder to ourselves. In this article, we’re going to walk you through a few of the myriad ways that your experiences shape you.
Your Experiences Can Help You Better Yourself
We all go through difficult times, trials and hardships, and make mistakes in our lives, but how do those negative experiences work to shape us as people? There are a number of ways these types of experiences can shape you.
On the positive side of things, these experiences can help you to not make the same mistakes again.
On the negative side of things, which is usually caused by a grudge being held or the need for something to be let go of, these experiences can cause us to exile ourselves from others out of fear or mistrust, keep us from trying new things or taking on new challenges, and can even cause paranoia to creep in.
The key is to see how your experiences start to affect you and, if you notice that it starts to affect you negatively, take steps to change your behavior.
Your Experiences Can Change How You Make Decisions
One of the biggest ways in which your experiences work to shape you is in the decisions you make and how you make them. Each experience you have in life has the potential to affect your choices further down the road.
For example, let’s say you have a particularly bad experience with someone wherein their behavior made you think “I never want to be seen that way!” In that moment, you launched a shaping in your decision-making process; now, when a similar situation arises, you’ll remember that person and curb your behavior.
Another example would be you witnessing a person being extremely generous or someone is very kind and generous to you, leading you to want to behave better and be kinder and more generous, as well.
Your Experiences Can Shape How You Think
Believe it or not, our experiences play a huge role in our thought processes and how we see the world. If you had nothing but negative experiences, chances are you’re going to be pessimistic and untrusting.
However, if you’d had a lot of positive experiences, you may be more optimistic and more likely to help those around you. Each experience you have influences you to view situations in a certain light; all of them work together to create the patchwork through which you see the world.
This is how so many people can view the same situation in so many different ways. It’s also how we change and grow overtime. Our experiences influence all of that and work to shape us into the people we are today.
Each experience you go through in life has the potential to have a positive or negative effect on how you view the world and the people that inhabit it. These experiences work to shape our worldview, opinions, and a lot of our traits as we grow and develop as humans.
The combination of all our experiences and how they affected us contributes to our unique way of seeing the world, situations, and people. That’s how we get so many different unique views and ways of handling situations; each person has a different view of each experience and a unique collection of experiences that have all worked to shape their unique view and personality.
