Can we undo what we’ve done in the past? An obvious answer: no. Yet we can do something else for now and in the future. We made mistakes – or maybe because only we put them into several contexts, they became mistakes. And obviously we only could take some learning points from those. The question now is whether we do really learn from what we did in the past or not? The learning process – as well as relearn and unlearn, shall always happen even in a very bad or negative situation.

I recently had a chance to meet some of my good friends to discuss several issues, one of them is related to dealing with difficult situation and about negative mental health in the workplace. Both are indeed undesired situations in our work-life, nobody wants to experience them, but they happen anyway.

What surprised me was that some of my friends closed their sharing with learning points, despite of what already happened to them. I was then took some minutes to process it, and to reflect on whether I also did the same: learning from difficult situations.

In difficult situations, we tend to focus our energy to manage our stress, emotion, and actions – and less energy is left to process everything mindfully to be able to learn from those situations.

It’s kind of a good reminder for me – to not only learn from desired situations, but also to take points of learning from difficult situations: to learn why this situation happened and how we can avoid the same in the future, to learn how our reaction toward the situation as well as the impact of our reaction and how we can improve if we face similar situation, to learn how the system around us react following our reaction towards the situation and how we can minimize the risk of it.

This is only a short note to remind myself that even in a difficult situation, I still need to spare some energy and time to learn something – and to improve myself better.

@yosea_kurnianto