Learn Your Lessons Well

Have you ever experienced a life crisis from which you pull through and say to yourself "wow, I really learned a lesson this time, that's never going to happen to me again!" And did it happen again?
Well it happened to me again. Many moons ago when I moved into the city (with a savings account mind you) I found myself a few years later in a terrible financial ditch. Now I can chalk that up somewhat to youth and my now tamed wild streak :) (seriously Manhattan has ALOT of bars) but it also happened due to poor money management. At a young age I found myself in a whole lotta debt and it was really very scary. I was fortunate enough to get a loan to pay off my debt and was soooo glad that I learned that lesson and that would certainly never happen to me again!!
Yet here I am, a wise and mature (ahem) woman in her (EARLY) 40s again in a strapped financial situation. And I ask myself  "how did this happen again? I thought I learned my lesson??"
But I realize now that merely recognizing that you are in a bad situation and telling yourself you learned from it and it will never happen again is not the same thing as learning ABOUT what happened and then taking ACTION so that it does not happen again.
I needed to analyze WHY I got into the situation and make a clear and concise plan of how going forward I would make changes to ensure that this would not occur in my life again. I needed to do then what I am doing now. Creating a budget, recording every penny I am spending, making wise financial decisions, etc, etc. The point is that I stepped back from my situation and realized that I needed to take concrete steps that would create change.
If we tell ourselves that we have learned something from a crisis but we are doing nothing differently, than really what have we learned?? Crisis is an opportunity to bring on change for the better, as long as the CHANGE component does not get over looked!