According to life coach Earl Nightingale, only people who truly know what they want manage to achieve it. To get something out of life, wishing for it isn't enough: you also have to truly want it. Becoming the lead actress of your own life, understanding what really stands in the way of success, and changing your reaction instead of simply enduring events: here's how to take back the reins.
Becoming the Lead Actress of Your Own Life
When you're determined to achieve a particular outcome, you're willing to do whatever it takes to get there — to act with a goal in mind, no matter your starting point. A 'self-made man' started with nothing and built everything himself: to get there, he decided to change his circumstances, to ask himself the right questions, and to want to move forward. This kind of growth plays out through decisions, sometimes through detours, before finding the right path again — that's what we call perseverance, made possible once you become aware that you're responsible for the path you've taken.
American entrepreneur, coach, and writer Jim Rohn sums it up this way: 'You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.' Each of us is responsible for the quality of our own life — for our finances, the quality of our relationships, our health, our emotions. This reasoning applies everywhere, for everyone.
The Habits That Hold Us Back
We've been conditioned to justify everything that happens to us. If we don't like something in our lives, it's often someone or something else's fault: it's easier to blame a boss's attitude, the economy, or bad luck than to be creative and come up with new ideas. If we're unhappy, it's not because of what happens to us, but because of the excessive importance we give it.
No one else can live our life for us: we are the ones producing the results we experience. Being 100% responsible for your life means understanding that we are the authors of the emotions and thoughts that accompany our experiences, and responsible for how we react to them.
Understanding Success
A person's success is often attributed to their good mood, positive thinking, a wealthy family, or a stroke of luck. Yet these reasons aren't enough to explain success on their own: 'positive attitude' — seeing the glass half full rather than half empty, knowing how to be grateful for what you have — is a way of living that lets you recharge and affirm your values. To succeed, you'd need to stop complaining and give up your status as a victim of circumstance, remembering that there's always a way to change things.
But for various reasons (cultural inhibitions, fear, the need for security), we often keep things as they are, clinging to our comfort zone. Some will object: how could a person who was the victim of an accident, in the wrong place at the wrong time, be responsible for what happened to them? They're right on one point — the victim never chose to have an accident — but wrong on another: they choose to see themselves as a victim, when they could instead choose to overcome the ordeal.
A striking example: Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered from locked-in syndrome, a rare neurological condition in which the patient remains fully conscious but completely paralyzed, apart from the ability to blink. He 'wrote' an autobiographical book published in 1997, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, dictating every letter by blinking his left eye — the very title of the book being a metaphor for a body that no longer answers to the mind.
The Formula for Change
In his book The Success Principles, published in 2006, Jack Canfield lays out a formula to make things clearer:
Event (what actually happens) + Reaction = Outcome(s)
Faced with a given event, it's our reactions that determine the outcome. Blaming the event for the result leaves us passive and pushes us to look for excuses; deciding to change our reaction, as many times as needed, instead makes it possible to reach a satisfying outcome. Albert Einstein summed up this idea: 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.'
Changing our reaction means questioning ourselves, communicating differently, perceiving our surroundings in a new way, shifting our attitude. We can't control events, but we can control our reactions — everything we do, think, and say should be aligned with our goals and values.
'Sow an act, you reap a habit; sow a habit, you reap a character; sow a character, you reap a destiny.' — the Dalai Lama
This is how each of us becomes 100% responsible for our own life. When we don't get the result we expected, here are a few questions worth asking: 'What did I do to end up here?' (different from 'what did I do to deserve this?'), thinking rationally rather than emotionally. 'What was I thinking?', 'What were my beliefs on the matter?', 'What did I say, or fail to say, that pushed that person to act that way?', and finally: 'What do I need to change in my approach to get the result I want, next time?'
By: Houda Chouk
