If Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade

Self improvement can seem like a daunting concept, often requiring you to change behaviours and habits that you’ve been indulging in for years, sometimes decades. While you may feel you want to change things in your life, actually doing it is something very different. For this reason, many people just talk about improving their sense of self but never do anything about it. But how does one turn those words into action?

Some of the most drastic self improvement measures anyone can take involve changing their mind, rather than any kind of physical situation. One of the main things that fans of self improvement advocate is trying to remove, or at least depress, your negative impulses. This can have a big effect on you, making your life seem better and also making you a more attractive person to spend time with. A new attitude can be the beginning of a new you.

At this junction, an old phrase becomes apposite: “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Other adages along the same lines exist – such as “every cloud has a silver lining” – but for most the former is the most astute. It is all about taking the bitter, unpleasant things in life and making them more palatable.

It is natural human instinct to react negatively when something bad happens to us, but very rarely does that negativity ever produce any results. Sitting around talking about how annoyed or disappointed you are achieves nothing but perhaps making you feel a touch better. One of the biggest parts of self improvement is to take that bad situation and try and see the good in it. This takes work and practice, but eventually can lead to a more positive, less cynical – and therefore more pleasant – you. There is a positive to everything – you just might have to look hard to find it.

Understanding What Is Possible

In a dream world, every little boy who dreams of being a fighter pilot eventually becomes one, and every little girl gets to take her turn centre stage as the prima Ballerina. Yet the key word here is ‘dream’; unfortunately, save for a lucky few of extremely talented individuals who give their lives to achieving their goal, this never happens. As children, it’s okay to dream, there’s no need for realism and we can sit back and dream of the super-cool sky fights or bouquet of flowers on opening night. Dreaming of the impossible is all what childhood is about.

It isn’t, however, what adulthood is about. Adulthood is about realising that some things aren’t possible. This might sound like a ridiculously simple sentiment, but it’s something a worrying amount of people fail to grasp.

In truth, it’s easy to see why, and the blame does not lay solely at the feet of the individual. In modern society, we’re foisted the idea of the ‘can do!’ attitude. If you want something, you’re encouraged to get it – and worry about the consequences later. When we can turn back time’s effect on the body and spend money without actually having it, a lot of people fail to see why they can’t have it all. These are the people that quit their jobs to form a band and six months later, with no money and no home, still say it was worth it, because they lived their dream. It wasn’t worth it, and a full five years on, those people have seen the light and just refer to their band period as ‘The Embarrassing Incident’.

The biggest key to self improvement is to understand, and accept, your limits. You may still dream of being a fighter pilot, but to achieve true contentment you need to see that it isn’t going to happen. Instead, when embarking on a course of self improvement, see what you realistically can change. Maybe pay off your mortgage early or give more to charity – obtainable goals are the key, and through them and not their flight-of-fancy counterparts, you will see your life improve.

The Self Improvement Industry

If the authors of prominent self-improvement book “First Things First” are to be believed, literature designed to help people improve their lives has been in circulation as far back as 2500BC. Although this may not be entirely accurate, the fact remains that self improvement has always be in the mind of the public.

Yet it is really the late 1980s and 90s that brought self improvement and self help to life. The boom was huge and seemingly ever-lasting, going from very little to an awful lot. Self improvement found it’s way in to popular culture and has never really let go, making an admirable leap – that probably made some marketing guru a fortune – from hippy-like to generally accepted.

The self improvement industry is, quite literally, huge. If you type ’self improvement’ into Amazon, over 10,000 books alone will be listed for your perusal. There is then the huge numbers of websites dedicated to creating a better you. Google Blog Search lists over 500,000 blog posts that have some element of self improvement contained within their text.

There are then hundreds of self-styled “life coaches”, some of whom claim that using their unique skills they can teach you how to live a better life. No matter what you’ve got to spend, it would seem that any amount will buy a little self improvement.

The problem with such a saturated market is that, for someone beginning to explore self improvement, the options can seem endless and mind boggling.

The easy answer is to look for things focusing on the aspect of life that you yourself which to improve. This may seem simple, but in the mire it can sometimes take a little effort to find something truly relevant. When you’ve found what you think you’re looking for, be smart and check previous user reviews. Don’t be misled by outlandish claims of miracle works on the back of a book or website banner – find out for yourself what real people really think.

If at first you don’t succeed, don’t dismiss the entire industry because of one bad experience. There clearly is something in self improvement, or it wouldn’t be such a dominant market, so keep trying until you find the exact right fit.

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