Take Control of Your Life

When you take ownership over everything in your life, you take control over everything in your life!

There are a billion things in this world that we cannot control, but we can control our attitude and our actions.  And with this, we can control our life.  This conversation goes hand in hand with my last blog post about the compound effect so if you haven’t checked that out yet, make sure you do so!

The first step in extreme ownership is to stop blaming others for our problems.  No one “made you” lose your job.  No one “ruined your life.”  Yes, things happened to you and they may even be bad things, they may be things that were very traumatic (and for that I am deeply sorry).  And even in the midst of bad things we can work to take control over the future of our life.  If you are spending so much time trying to find someone to blame for your hardships that means you are not spending time trying to figure out how to solve your problem.  It means you are not spending time taking action steps to eliminate your problem.

Let’s use the example of losing your job to further illustrate this.  If you lost your job, you can be pissed off at your boss and go home and sulk and worry OR you can open your eyes and realize you have just been liberated!  You have the whole dang world open to you now!  You can go out and get any job you want.  You can build a business.  You can get a higher paying job.  The sky is the limit. Have you ever heard the saying “don’t stare so long at the closed door that you don’t see the other door opening for you” (paraphrased)?  That is exactly this.  Of course you might be disappointed, but that doesn’t mean that you need to find someone to blame or drag the company’s name through the mud.  It just means you have been knocked down and it’s time to stand up again!

This idea of extreme ownership is not the easiest thing to do, I’m not gonna lie.  But if you can start to shift your thinking, you can really start to change your life. There are so many people in life that have been handed a bad card, amongst those people there are people who rise up and there are people who choose to stay in the shit.  Don’t be the latter.  I think of Mallory Weggemann who became paraplegic in her teenage years and she has gone on to win Olympic gold medals for swimming!  She even sustained another injury to one of her arms and has continued to push forward.  She wrote a book Limitless (I highly recommend) and is sharing her story with the world to help inspire people and show them when one door closes, as sad and hard as it freaking is sometimes, that there is still good to be done.  You still have the control over how you react to the circumstances that have been presented.  

So how do you start to shift your mindset?  First thing is first - if you have experienced any trauma (I mean we all have but some more horrific than others), please consider going to therapy or find a highly trained coach or hypnotherapist that specializes in trauma to help you work through the very natural emotions that you are feeling and have bottled up.  We cannot accept love and light into our life and move forward with life if we have not first expressed the emotions that we have within us.  And this brings me to one really important reminder, taking ownership over your life does not mean suppressing any negative emotions that you feel as a result of what has happened.  Instead it means expressing, releasing and working through those emotions.  This is vitally important.  Our bodies, our emotions is all energy.  If your body is filled with anger or sadness it will be impossible to feel love and happiness in any true and meaningful way. 

The next thing to do is to catch yourself when you start to hear yourself blaming someone else or even something else!  I caught myself recently after a morning of too many mimosas blaming the champagne.  I mean clearly the champagne must have been too strong right?! Like what kind of champagne was that anyway?!  But guess what friends - I had to stop myself and remind myself that it was my decision to drink the mimosas.  And to keep drinking the mimosas.  Honestly, even such a silly example like this is such a great display of how EASY it is for us to pass the blame instead of just owning up to what has happened.  So when you hear yourself blaming someone else, stop yourself and reframe it.  Reframe it in a way that puts you in control of the situation.  “I lost my job.  I am now a free agent in the market place and can go get a job anywhere I want!”  The next step will help to keep you forward focused.

Now that you have taken ownership over your situation, make a plan to move forward.  Do you need to start a job search?  Then put a plan in place to start doing that.  Do you need to remove all the cookies from the house so they are not there to binge eat when you have a hard day?  What do you need to do to move forward in a positive way?  What do you need to do to bring joy into your life after something hard happened?  Make a plan that feels good to you.  You should feel empowered and enlightened knowing that now that this thing has happened to you, you are taking control over the wheel and where your life goes from here!

Have a vision for what your future life looks like.  Do you have a job that you love that pays you well?  Do you have a partner that supports and encourages you?  Truly imagine it - go there in your mind.  Feel it in your body.  What does it feel like? How do you feel in your vision?  It might feel like that vision of your life is far away, but my friend it only gets closer by taking baby steps in your future visions direction.  Don’t stay stagnant thinking about where everything went wrong.  Instead let’s think about what the next step you need to take RIGHT NOW to start toward your dream.  This is truly taking control of your life.  This is taking back the reins.  This is telling the plane where to go.  This is extreme ownership.

If you stay in a place of sulking over what has happened to you, you can negatively affect your mental health.  You are constantly telling yourself that you are not safe and that things just happen to you.  This can easily translate into depression or anxiety if we are not careful to release the emotion, heal our hearts and make a plan to move forward.  It starts with us just deciding that we are in control of our life, our destiny.  You can do this!