A while back when I was coaching people through challenges in their lives, I found myself puzzling over the difficulties we have in making worthwhile changes in our lives. “Why is that?” I wondered.
There seemed to be as many excuses for staying stuck as there are people, each of them specific to the person and situation. But one day I happened on a sentence that clarified it all for me. “If you want to change your life,” it went, “you have to change your life.”
Bingo! It’s not like there’s some big blank spot in your life with nothing in it, just waiting for you to fill it in with the new, improved you. Nope. You have to toss out something that’s in your life now to make room for the new stuff.
What triggered the memory of that discovery was a comment I came across this week that shed more light on the challenge of making changes. “Life doesn’t come with a remote control,” it said, “You have to get up and change it yourself.”
Aha. That’s a big why, too. We really don’t like the idea that we have to be, gulp, responsible for ourselves. We’d rather let somebody else do the grown-up stuff. It doesn’t sound like any fun at all.
But here’s a secret. Taking control of your life is the most fun thing of all! You get to feel in charge, empowered and free, capable of saying your own yes or no to yourself and to the whole world around you.
So if you want your life to be different than it is now, the first thing you have to do is to get a nice, clear picture of what you want. That’s a really important step. Get that first. Then, once you have a solid picture of what you want, decide what it’s worth to you, and figure out what you can trade for it. What are you spending minutes on now that you could trade for minutes of being in control, the director of your own show, the composer of your own song? Take some of those minutes and use them to figure out what your next best step could be. And there you go; you’re on your way.
In real life, if feels a lot more complex than that. But the bottom line is still the same. If you want to change your life, you can decide to get up and switch to a more appealing channel. That’s one of the cool parts about being a human being. We get to decide!
Isn’t life an interesting place!
Wishing you a most excellent week,
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Adriano Gadini from Pixabay