How to Find The Good In Every Situation...

How to Find The Good In Every Situation... with Samia Bano

Want to #takecontrolofyourlife more and better? Then you need to learn how to #staycalm and #relax even in the face of adversity!

And yes, this is possible, and it will also #makechangefunandeasy for you. :)

Listen now to this episode with #HappinessExpert Samia Bano to learn the very 1st key that will allow you to stay calm and relax even in situations you find currently challenging, i.e. How to #FindTheGood In Every Situation.

To Book your Free HAPPINESS 101 EXPLORATION CALL with Samia, click: https://my.timetrade.com/book/JX9XJ

#MakeChangeHappen #mindsetiseverything #mindsetshift #mindsetreset #MindsetMatters #livejoyfully #HowToBeHappy

Here's the audio version of this episode:

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Full Video Transcription

Hello Salam, Shalom, Sat Sri Akal, Namaste, Aloha. If you don't know me already, my name is Samia Bano. I'm your happiness expert and author of the book, “Make change fun and easy”. And the subtitle is, “How to create inner peace to world peace in three simple steps”.

So that's what I'm all about. I am committed to cultivating inner peace and happiness for myself and helping others to do the same, helping you to do the same. And I figured that, you know, this topic is such a fabulous topic. It's like the one I love to talk about the most. But not everyone has the time and the inclination to actually read a book anymore. So what I'm gonna do is break it down into tiny pieces, like all the most important, amazing lessons that I share in the book. I’m going to share them during these live broadcasts. And I'll even go deeper than I did in the book, because guess what? Since I wrote this book a few years ago I have been continuing to learn and grow and become even wiser in the ways of how to make change fun and easy.

Okay, so I thought today I would focus on one of the keys to make change fun and easy. And that is, how to stay relaxed even in the face of adversity, okay? All right!

So you can imagine any kind of situation that's maybe really difficult for you to deal with in your life. That's what we're talking about when we say how to stay calm and relaxed in the face of adversity. This is something that's going to apply to any situation okay, where you're feeling not calm, and not relaxed, and not happy, and so forth.

So there are actually, there's a saying that I want to share with you. It's sort of like inspiring the content of our talk today. So this is actually a quote from the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. And in this quote, the Prophet Muhammad says:

“Wondrous is the affair of the believer for there is good for the believer in every matter. And this is not the case with anyone except the believer. If the believer is happy, then they thank God and thus there is good in the situation for them. And if the believer is harmed, then the believer shows patience, and thus there is good in the situation for them.”

So this, actually, the saying, is actually very deep, and I could talk for an hour just elucidating the finer points, the depth of wisdom that's contained in this. But I'm not going to do that.

My goal this time is to be just a few minutes, just a few minutes in length. Okay so let me quickly read through the saying again, and then I will elucidate only one part of it today. And then we will do the rest of it in future podcasts. All right? Sound good? Okay!

So the saying is: “Wondrous is the affair of the believer for there is good for the believer in every matter. And this is not the case with anyone except the believer. If the believer is happy then they thank Allah, and thus there is good in the situation for them. And if the believer is harmed, then they show patience and thus there's good in the situation for them.”

Okay, so the part that I really want to focus on today as the first key for us to talk about is the idea that in every matter, in every matter, there is good, for the believer. But you know what we'll get more into, well believer, believer of what? Believer of who, what? We'll get into that later.

But for right now just notice that this saying is encouraging us to take on a perspective that says, you know what, no matter what the circumstance is, there's good in it for me, right. And think about how key that is, how key that kind of a perspective is if you are going to be able to stay calm and relaxed in the face of adversity. If you think a situation is bad, if a situation is difficult, if you think it's stressful, then of course you're going to feel stressed. You're going to feel bad. You're not going to be able to be calm and relaxed in that situation because it's bad, because it's stressful, right?

So you have to change your perspective on the situation. You have to actually let go of your judgment of the situation being bad. Actually that's the key you know. So you have to learn to let go of your judgments, of whatever the circumstance you may be in. Stop judging them, stop judging those circumstances as good or bad. Don't even judge it as good, really, you know, although... Because if you if you allow yourself to judge things at all in terms of good and bad, there will be times you'll judge things to be good, situations to be good, but then there will be other times when you will judge that circumstances or those situations are bad. So really the goal is to stop that kind of judgmental thinking.

And I'll give you an analogy. Okay, so I, as I mentioned, I'm your happiness expert. So my primary focus in my work is actually to start by helping people cultivate inner peace. Because until you have inner peace, you really can't effectively begin to cultivate and create world peace, okay? So when we're talking about cultivating inner peace, think about what disturbs your inner peace.

I'll tell you for me one of the things that really disturbed my inner peace was how I judged myself. You know I blamed myself, I shamed myself. And you know I've shared, if you know me, you know I've shared in the past, that I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse. So I actually had a very, very intense challenge when it came to how much I blamed and shamed myself. It caused a lot of suffering and magnified my trauma manyfold. Because even before I told anyone, like for so many years I didn't even tell anyone about having experienced the abuse, because I was too afraid that if I told people that I was, you know, abused that they would actually blame me and say it was my fault.

And why did I think that? Because I thought that about me. I thought it was my fault that I got abused. Because I did not, you know, take action, enough action, to stop the abuse from happening. Or you know, that I did something to attract attention to myself so that the person, you know, was tempted to abuse me or whatever. You know these crazy, crazy thoughts of blame and judgment that I had. So you know, I know that when it came to my relationship with myself, my tendency to blame and judge myself was a huge obstacle in my path to being able to have a loving relationship with myself.

Now think about interpersonal relationships, right. Because if I want to live with inner peace, it's like I can't exist in a bubble. I don't exist in a bubble, do I? No. So the relationships that I have with other people in my life, if they're not healthy, if they're not happy, then I also, you know, cannot be healthy and happy and peaceful in my life as a whole. So it's very important that I have healthy, happy relationships. But guess what? When we are striving to have healthy, happy relationships in our life, if we -- the extent I would say, the extent to which we blame and judge and shame the other people in our lives, that's the extent to which our relationships are not peaceful and happy. True or true? Right.

I mean, it's like how can you be feeling peaceful and happy in the company of someone that you think is bad, doing bad things, you know? If you're judging them, if you're criticizing them, shaming them, blaming them, etc. So when you are judging other people then your relationships with other people can't be happy.

And turns out, you know what this saying of the Prophet Muhammad is clueing us in on, is that if you want to have a more healthy relationship with the circumstances of your life, with the results that emerge in your life, then you need to let go of your judgments of those circumstances and results also. So just as, you know, in order to have a more healthy relationship with myself or with other people, I need to instead of blame and judgment and shame, I need to cultivate empathy and compassion, right? So in this case, when I want to improve my relationship with my circumstances, my mindset around my circumstances, well, what do I cultivate instead of blame and shame and judgment?

Well, the saying gives us those clues, right? Talks about gratitude and patience. So well, yes, okay, so we'll talk about those keys of practicing gratitude and patience in the face of adversity next time. But for today, just just get this in your mind, just just really hone in on this idea that you need to stop judging the circumstances of your life as good or bad. So whatever the circumstance you are in, if your purpose, if your goal is to create as much peace and happiness for yourself and others around you, then you have to stop judging that situation as bad, okay?

And so, there is another saying that I want to share with you, and this one, this is a quote I believe by John Adams. So John Adams says that, “every problem is an opportunity in disguise”. “Every problem is an opportunity in disguise”, right? So this gives you a way of like, how do I stop judging situations as bad, circumstances as bad. Well, think about how every problem is an opportunity in disguise. What's that hidden opportunity in your current circumstances that are bothering you, you know? And so when you begin to shift your mindset and think about that opportunity, about the good that is there in that situation for you, or that you can create in that situation for you, that is when you see your...you'll be able to get to that place of feeling more calm and relaxed, right. Because, guess what? If this is not a bad situation, it's just an opportunity, right? It's just an opportunity to create some positive change, then why would you be freaking out? Why would you be worried, right? You have no reason left to feel stressed and so forth. So this is the first key to maintaining your calm and relaxed way of feeling and being, even in the face of adversity.