Carl G. Jung: How to become who you want to become

"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become."

- Carl Gustav Jung

Often we can't choose which situations happen to us. Whether a partner breaks up with us, whether we don't get the job we wanted or whether our coffee cup falls off the breakfast table.
We have little or no influence over many situations. However, the question is not what happens to us, but how we deal with it. Do I learn something from the situation, or do I just take it as something negative that happened to me.

If I see something as a completed event, and myself only as the object of this event, it is difficult to learn something from it. However, if I try to consider what led to this event, there is always something I can take away from it: for example, what I can do to ensure that something like this does not happen again. How I can live with the consequences, or learn something from it.

When you train your thinking and start to see different situations from as many perspectives as possible, you also have the possibility to learn more from a situation than just: "It was obvious that this would happen to me, only bad things happen to me all the time."
Likewise, it is dangerous if in your own thoughts, you always put yourself in the victim role, because you become selective and focus primarily on the negative events and therefore perceive them more intensely and more frequently.

So we should approach any situation as objectively as possible and ask ourselves:

"What can I learn from this situation, and then pick out the traits I want to embed in my character from what I've learned."

Thus, we do not become what happens to us, but what we decide to become. Just as the Swiss psychoanalyst and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung taught about a hundred years ago.

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