What Life Is Trying to Teach You in Your Daily Experiences

Six Steps for Discovering the Hidden Messages in Your Life.

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and founder of BestPsychicDirectory.com. You’re reading his articles on Bob Olson Connect.

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

In the 1990s, I wrote an article about a woman from my neighborhood who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident, which was published in the local newspaper. When I wrote the story about my relationship with the woman, a powerful insight into everyday social interactions came through in my writing. It seemed like a stroke of luck that I learned a lesson about life by writing the story.

Over time, I wrote dozens of stories about my real-life experiences that taught me insights about life. I have shared many of these stories with you here on Bob Olson Connect. I discovered that the wisdom I gained from these stories wasn’t a stroke of luck after all; gaining insight became an expected result of the process I underwent in writing about my experiences.

Moreover, while readers of these stories have reflected that they are entertaining, they offer something much more valuable than mere entertainment. These stories are evidence that lessons are being taught in our everyday experiences.

I’ve always loved telling my friends and family stories about my life's engaging, humorous, mysterious, and sometimes thrilling experiences. It was entertaining for them to hear them and fun for me to observe their reactions. But it wasn’t until I began writing about these stories that the lessons became apparent. As the years and decades passed, I returned to the stories I’d written. I rewrote them because I was growing as a writer and storyteller. With each rewrite, I reveled in the wisdom these stories revealed to me.

I believe we are guided by a higher intelligence, which constantly tries to direct us toward our highest path. In this way, many of the events that happen in our lives hold meaningful messages. These messages might come from advice someone gives us, a repeated pattern the experience shows us, or something we observe. Regardless of how they show up, these guiding messages are recognizable because we are meant to gain the wisdom they offer.

You, too, have experiences that can teach you lessons for growth and guidance. I’m writing this to help you see how the process works. If you’re like me, writing about your experiences can help you identify the lessons in your daily life. You need not be a professional writer. The simple act of journaling the details of your life's events should be enough to help bring forth the lessons.

While I’ve written dozens of stories, I have a new book coming out this summer that shares twenty-three of my favorites. These stories have been known to engage minds, warm hearts, and make people feel better about humanity. More importantly, however, these stories are examples of the transformative insights hidden below the surface of our experiences.

The stories I have shared with you on Bob Olson Connect have taught, through example, how our daily life experiences hold messages, guidance, and insight for us. Now, it is your turn to discover the messages, guidance, and insight in your own experiences. You can do this in six simple steps, which I have taken from my new book, Insight From Hindsight: Stories That Reveal What Life Is Trying To Teach You.

Six Steps for Discovering the Hidden Messages in Your Daily Experiences

Step 1: Choose an experience.

Choose an event or experience from your life that has stayed on your mind. It could have happened yesterday, last week, or last year. What makes it stand out is that you remember it. Perhaps you even told a few people about it. The more recent the event, the easier it will be to remember.

Step 2: Write the story down.

If you can tell the story to someone, you can write about it. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling. This is not going to be graded or published in a magazine. Just record the details of the story as you remember them—this happened, then this happened, then this happened—until the end. Additional details will come to you while you’re writing.

If writing is challenging, you can record yourself telling the story verbally and transcribe the audio for a written version.

Step 3: Rewrite your story to include your thoughts and feelings.

If you recall “Trapped,” the story about my dog Libby getting caught in a trap, you will recognize that the insight I gained from telling that story derived from what I thought and felt. As I tried to open the trap to free Libby’s paw, I feared a future that never transpired. I saw myself rushing Libby to the emergency animal clinic. I was sure I would have to cancel the vacation Melissa and I were about to take. And I imagined carrying Libby up our stairway for months. Yet none of those imaginings ever happened.

The insight that your life is trying to teach you is often hidden within your thoughts and feelings. Begin with your thoughts. Include any opinions, beliefs, judgments, expectations, or biases that crossed your mind as the experience unfolded. Then, write down any emotions you felt. Were you scared, enthusiastic, worried, happy, suspicious, grateful, or regretful? Then, record any meaningful conversations that took place. If you spoke to someone during the experience, write out your dialogue. Your dialogue often expresses what you were thinking and feeling.

All these memories are meaningful and might be clues to what the experience held for you. As you get used to this process, you will write about your thoughts and emotions (Step 3) while writing down the story's details (Step 2). You won’t need to do this in two steps. For now, however, it might be helpful to write down what happened first and then add what you were thinking and feeling during that experience later.

Step 4: Determine what the experience was trying to teach you.

Now that you’ve written the story, what can you learn from it? Viewing the story in hindsight, what takeaway can you gain about people, society, humanity, or yourself? What can you discover from what you were thinking or feeling? What can you learn from something that was said to you? Was there a divine synchronicity or repeated pattern screaming for your attention? And finally, how might you react, think, or feel differently if a similar experience happened again?

In “Hiding Ants,” I realized that my father was making choices based on the level of consciousness that governed his life at the time—he was a husband and father who needed to take care of his family. In “The Power of Limiting Beliefs,” Mrs. White said something at the end of that story to make me aware of the limitations of my beliefs. In “The Snowman, the Superhero, and the Soldier,” I gained an appreciation for the different kinds of heroes in our lives. And in “Confronting Our Fences,” I learned that the boundaries we created in the past might no longer serve us.

Step 5: Write the lesson learned in one or two sentences.

Now that you’ve gained insight by looking at your experience in hindsight, think about the lesson this experience taught you. How might you summarize what you learned in a sentence or two? Writing it down can help you to absorb the lesson.

After writing the story about Libby in the trap, I wrote: “Living in the present moment reduces stress and prevents unnecessary suffering.”

After my story, “As Luck Would Have It,” about my attempted carjacking, I wrote: “Seeing yourself as lucky or unlucky is a choice. Consider yourself lucky.”

Step 6: Express your gratitude for the insights you gained.

Express your gratitude out loud for the wisdom you have gained. You can thank life itself, your higher self, God, your guides, or your angels—whatever fits within your personal beliefs. The final step in this practice is feeling grateful for what life has taught you because it informs your guiding power that you are paying attention.

One reason to feel grateful for the experiences that teach us lessons is the transformation they provide us from victimhood to empowerment. Once we become aware that our daily life experiences offer us guidance and wisdom, we feel more empowered because we know that life is happening “for” us. The opposite is that we feel like victims who believe random events are happening “to” us.

Said another way, whenever I encounter a challenging experience, I always wonder what positive lesson my current challenge holds for me. It instantly shifts the experience from something negative that is happening “to” me to something meaningful that is happening “for” me.

I hope this awareness and simple six-step process help you view your challenging experiences as meaningful, even if you cannot identify the meaning while it’s happening. There will be time later to discover the insight by viewing your experience in hindsight.

With love,
Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the top directory of psychics, mediums, and animal communicators, BestPsychicDirectory.com. This is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.