Your life will change when _you_ change your life.
You have limited control of your circumstances. You can’t change the past, you can’t change other people, you can’t change a lot of the events happening around you. But you can control how you respond to those events and to what other people do. That’s where You Have A Choice (the title of my book).
But most people give up that choice. They prefer giving their autonomy away and believing they have no choice e.g. “I have to do what my manager says” or “I have to get everything done that is asked of me”. They live by a set of inviolable rules (“I must”, “I have to”, “I could never”) and never question who is enforcing those rules upon them (spoiler alert: it’s themselves).
At some point, they have a choice to keep following the rules that are no longer serving them, or to try an experiment with a new behavior or response to their circumstances. If they try the experiment, they may find the consequences are not what they expect. All of a sudden, they have a choice in how to respond – the rule is revealed to be artificial and outdated.
But only you can choose to run the experiment. Only you can change your life.
One of the repeated questions in the book is “How are you the problem?” That doesn’t mean you are the only problem or that I am trying to blame you as the victim. It means recognizing that your actions are contributing to the circumstances you say you don’t want. You can wait and hope that somebody else will magically change (maybe your manager that has overworked you to burnout for two years will suddenly see the light and start valuing work-life balance), but that leaves you with no agency.
The one thing you control is yourself – to change the results, _you_ can try doing something different. Try one experiment where you do the opposite of how you would normally react. It will feel uncomfortable – that’s expected. But try it anyway and see what happens. Maybe your fears will come true and the world will come crashing down. But most of the time your anxieties are overblown, and you will realize you have more freedom to operate than you imagined.
Regardless, I want you to own your choices. Choose the life you want to live. You may not have good choices or easy choices, but there are still choices. Maybe you keep working the soul-crushing job because you want to keep paying your mortgage. Maybe you take a step back at work because you want to be more present with your family. If you can’t do it all, be conscious and thoughtful about what you choose to do.
I’d love to hear about the choices you are consciously making in your life in the comments.