For the past 20 weeks, I’ve been posting TikTok videos where I share a different journaling idea each day. It has been quite a voyage of discovery for me, not only because of the awkwardness of being on camera every morning in my dressing gown but also because some of the writing prompts have caused me to reflect quite deeply on my life.
This week we were writing about our greatest life lessons. I invite you to journal with me as I reflect on my journey through life’s greatest lessons in resilience, vulnerability, gratitude, empathy and letting go. Here is the prompt for you to reflect on your own life lessons.
Think about some of the greatest life lessons you’ve encountered. Write about one of the most important ones and what you learned.
Five of My Greatest Life Lessons
As I pondered this question, I realised that narrowing it down to a single lesson would never be able to capture the essence of the experiences that have shaped my journey so far. So, instead, I’d like to share the top five life lessons that have profoundly impacted my path.
- The power of resilience: we will all be tested in our lives and experience unimaginably hard things, but what I have learned is that there is huge strength in the human spirit, and we can adapt and move through life’s challenges.
- Embrace vulnerability: I cannot tell you how many times in my engineering career that I was told to toughen up and basically suppress who I am to get the job done. Self-acceptance and learning how to be more comfortable with how you show up despite the pressures around you is hard. I now see how impactful vulnerability can be in building real trusting relationships and creating spaces where you feel belonging and safety.
- The importance of gratitude: I think this is related to this first one. It can be very easy to respond to setbacks negatively or worry about what the future might hold. When I was younger I had no idea about gratitude, but a thing that my mum used to always say was that “every cloud has a silver lining” and without realising it that phrase became a sort of mantra to me to help me look for the good in the bad – to find the things in my life to be grateful for.
- The value of empathy: I’ve always felt a deep sense of empathy towards others. It makes my heart ache to see someone else in distress. I think a little like my number two life lesson, for a long time I felt like this was a weakness, that there must be something wrong with me to feel so affected by other people’s pain. But now I am grateful for it, as it helps me to understand other people’s perspectives and I can show people more grace and understanding because I know that how people behave is often driven by what is going on behind the scenes.
- The art of letting go: My mum was a worrier, she held onto so much stress in her life, despite how hard she tried to find those silver linings. This is by far my greatest life lesson, that stress eats away at us, damaging our bodies at a cellular level. I have let go of many painful memories from my past, because I know holding onto grief and pain is not healthy, it serves no purpose in the life I have today and the future that I’m building. Of course, letting go is not an easy process, you don’t just in that instant decide to let it go and it’s gone. But you can decide to embrace the present moment and work on small little mindset changes, like gratitude, so that little by little, over time the past is so distant and removed from where you are now that it no longer has a hold on your thoughts and actions.
Journal with Me
Reflecting on these life lessons has been a beautiful and cathartic experience for me. I hope that by sharing mine, I’ve inspired you to embark on your own journey of self-discovery and growth. If you have felt compelled to journal about this or you already know what your greatest life lessons are, I’d love for you to share your stories.
And if you’d like to journal with me again, I’m on TikTok every day, where you’ll also find a large library of writing ideas to help you get started.