Refocused Living

Most people go through life living a truly boring existence. While it’s kind of weird for a personal development blog – out of all places – to say this, it’s the truth. Generally, people lead dull lives, they work at dull jobs, they invest their time in dull activities, and then they die in a dull way. (Okay, so maybe the last thing mentioned isn’t something they can control. But you get what I mean.)

Why on earth would anybody willingly want to live so…dully? It’d be easy for me to throw up my hands and say “Who knows?” – but in reality, there are a lot of reasons people want to live their lives as an unspectacular chain of events.

The funny thing is that all of these dull people constantly try to convince everybody else to be dull just like them. All of the time. For some reason, people adore attempting to talk others into living life just as they are. Since most of the people doing these attempts at converting are naturally dull, it takes on an odd twist: Living life to your absolute fullest is encouraged when you’re little, then discouraged once you hit adulthood. Dull-ness needs to rule once you can think for yourself!

But… who wouldn’t want to be the exception to the rule? Who doesn’t want a fabulous life that’s different from everybody else, from the time you’re little to when you’re older than dirt?

You can’t do that! That’s the exception!

When you’re a little kid, you’re often encouraged by nearly everybody around you to think big and dream even bigger. Whatever you want to achieve in life, you can certainly do it. You just have to believe you can, set a goal that you’re going to obtain what you want, and get working. Not even the sky is  your limit unless you limit yourself.

But along the way, as you grew older, something strange began to happen. Those people who told you that success was within reach and something you could grasp started to tell you the complete opposite.

Suddenly those same people are putting your dreams down. For example, does the following sound familiar, in any way, shape, or form?

“Oh, sorry. Did I just hear you say you want to be a pop singer? That’s not possible. You can’t do that; you can’t be the next Madonna. She’s the exception to the rule, she just got lucky. You gotta pick something more down to earth. Stop longing to be a famous pop singer. Why aren’t you thinking about going to college like your friends? What are you going to do for a living? Seriously, you cannot make a decent living singing. How are you going support yourself?”

There are literally hundreds of variations on this same theme. You can’t be the next (famous person!) because (they got lucky! they’re the exception!) Better go try your hand at something else, right? Right…?

Instead of dreaming these amazing dreams for yourself and being filled with the passion that you can achieve anything, you’re slowly taught to conform. After all, everybody wants to live like everybody else. That’s just a given. Who wants to show off, be amazing, and rock at life if you can live like the Joneses next door? Duh.

Where does this “You can’t do that!” stuff come from?

If you’ve ever had to deal with the assault-like verbal grenades like the one I just mentioned above, you know what it feels like for people to totally demean your aspirations. It’s no fun at all.

Why would people who care about your future dish out advice like that? In my experience, the cause is linked to two main reasons:

• A lack of courage. If somebody is trying to give you advice but it sounds directly opposite of what you want to hear, consider that he/she might be speaking from a mindset of fear. People who want to see you succeed and want you to be happy might be drawing from their own feelings of being fearful of success when they offer you up terrible advice. Take what they say with a grain of salt. They might not necessarily mean to put a damper on your dreams, but they have their own limiting beliefs that are darkly shading the advice they give you.
• Fear of your success. What would your success mean to these people if you went out, achieved what you set your mind to, and shattered their expectations to pieces? Would they truly be happy for you? Would they sulk and have resentment when they see what kind of person you’ve become? Your success might force them to reevaluate the boring life they’re living; your success would be a threat to their stability.

As you can tell, its not necessarily that these people don’t want you to succeed, but they’re afraid of realizing what your success would mean to them. (Also remember that things such as limiting beliefs can also skew judgement when these people give you advice.)

Come on! Be like everybody else! (Or not?)

It’s sometimes extremely difficult to break away from what everybody else is saying and go down your own brilliant path, especially when the status quo is pressuring you to stay exactly the same. But unfortunately for you, if you begin believing that your dreams aren’t worth clinging onto and turning into your own reality, your life starts to become a pale copy of everybody else’s.

What is it to be like everybody else, anyways? Does it mean you eat a lot of foods that shouldn’t ever be put into your body? Does it mean you slowly chip away your time at a 9 to 5 job, wishing you had the freedom to do anything else with your time? Does it mean you spend years of your life paying (possibly tens of) thousands of dollars to go to college to graduate and find yourself in one of these terrifying jobs?

Let’s be honest – who really wants to live like everybody else? Deep down inside, everybody’s thinking they could be the exception to the rule. Everybody wants to be a somebody who’s fabulous.

Who doesn’t want to be the person who can make their entire living online? Who doesn’t want to be the person who has the healthiest diet for themselves? Who doesn’t want to be the person who’s an extremely talented songwriter and brilliant singer? We call these people the exceptions to the norm. These people are the the people who others look up to, but everybody discourages their friends from becoming. These people are the ones who followed their dreams and made something of themselves.

What do you do when people attempt to curtail your dreams and bring you back “down to earth?” I hope you ignore these people. I hope you ignore all of them. Seriously. Are you honestly going to start believing these people, that you’re dreaming too much or that your head is in the clouds? Why would you deny yourself your very own dreams? Why would you even want to pretend that your aspirations don’t exist?

Letting somebody else tell you that you can’t do something is effectively giving away your power to create your own life. It’s like you’re conceding defeat.

These people may give you reasons that your dreams won’t work. And for a while, you may believe these reasons and you may even make up more reasons that your dreams will never work out in your favor. But behind all of the excuses you imagine up, do you really know the script that’s running through your mind?

“Oh, you’re right, (other human being). I could never do something like that. What was I even thinking? Thank you for helping me realize that! I won’t bother trying any longer.”

Think about that whiney, loser-like script for a moment. Doesn’t it sound utterly ridiculous to you? Somebody says you can’t do something, and you tell them right back “Oh. You’re right! I can’t!” What ever happened to your power to create the life you’ve always dreamed of? Did you suddenly forget that only you have that power and it can’t be given away to anybody else?

Don’t ever for a second doubt in yourself or in your dreams, no matter how big your dreams are or far off in the future you may be dreaming. If you don’t pursue your very own dreams, your life will wind up like everybody else’s. Dull. And pretty soon, you will try to convince everybody else to put away their power and to settle for a dull, dull life, just like yourself.

Be the Exception

The beauty and richness of human life isn’t found through mimicry of other people. It’s from transcending that little snag and becoming somebody who’s totally unique, so unique that their values, beliefs, and accomplishments can’t be classified as normal. It’s then that you become the exception.

Being the exception doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make astute, amazing scientific discoveries or change the pop music landscape for generations to come. It simply means you have to live true to yourself, without succumbing to other’s expectations of what you should become. It means going after your dreams in the face of everybody else, whether those dreams are super small or immensely huge.

It’s tough. Going after your desires is tough to do in a world that’s knocking on your door and reminding you 24/7 to be normal, reminding you that if you don’t act normal something is wrong with you. But you know what? The reward for being the exception is far greater than the reward for being identical to everyone else.

Nobody remembers the average people. Everybody remembers the exceptions. The average people don’t bother trying to touch other people’s lives with their skills, knowledge, and presence. The exceptional people reach out to other people and strive to make a difference in somebody else’s life, every single day.

Which of the two paths will you be choosing today? Will you become the exception?

Sometimes life feels completely overwhelming, as if the bad times are here to perpetually stay. Awful weather, unforeseen pot holes, and extremely long detours can force you to change directions on the road map to your goals. With no foreseeable end to your misery and way to get your life back on track, you feel awful, almost as if it feels like a form of suffering.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the bad things and lose focus of your ambitions when hard times crash into you like a 300 pound football player. It’s completely understandable, too. That’s a natural reaction.

Taking responsibility for your life – complete, total 100% responsibility – is one of the things that has gotten me through some of the toughest, most aggravating times of my life. It’s a difficult area to master, but learning what total responsibility is and then applying it to your life is richly rewarding.

Responsibility comes in two steps. First, you need to accept what your life is right at this very moment. Next, you need to take full responsibility for the changes that you can create in your life. Only you can make those changes happen.

Acceptance

A family member passes away. You lose your job. An unexpected medical emergency comes up. Something bad happens.

Or it may not even be an event like that. Maybe you feel totally stressed out from your daily load of schoolwork. Or you keep grinding your wheels at your job day in and day out but you just can’t quite seem to get ahead.

When something terrible happens or you feel as if your life is on a downward spiral, take a step back. Take a deep breath. Think about how your life looks as a whole. What parts are going amazingly well? What parts do you feel are crashing down on you? Try to look at the entire picture, not just the aspects of life you’re having trouble with. See how what you’re going through fits into the big picture.

Focusing solely on what’s going wrong in life is what most people decide to do. And as a first reaction, that’s natural. When I accidentally slide on ice getting into my car, the first thing I think isn’t “Gee, I wonder what I’m going to have for lunch?” It’s more like “Shoot! That hurt! Am I bleeding anywhere?” First reactions to any event zoom in on what happened. They’re like a snap decision in a situational analysis form.

Much like you have the option of viewing a tumble on a sheet of ice in different perspectives, from the game of life you have the option of using various lenses to get better understanding of your problem. You can focus on just the problem itself. Or you can focus on your life in general and how that problem will play out in the grand scheme of things. The former view often leads people to making rash decisions over a situation – decisions that don’t work out so well in the long run. The latter view is empowering and incredibly motivating. No longer does your situation look bleak; instead, you see how everything will eventually wind up. Your decisions are made with a cool head and logical reasoning, not your emotions.

It’s like eating an amazing 3 course dinner with a so-so dessert. Are you only going to focus on how okay the dessert tastes? Or will you remember the meal as a whole and how fantastic the rest of the food was? View your life together with the problem and the problem suddenly becomes easier to manage. What was a terrible, awful situation now turns slightly less horrible, as if streams of sunlight are beaming down on your life once again.

(I’m not saying to go all Pollyanna and think your bad situation will magically disappear; however, your problem will seem not as overwhelming when viewed in a larger perspective.)

Looking at the problem in a large setting also brings about acceptance. I’m not talking about acceptance of the problem, per se. Anybody can accept an individual aspects of their life – I can accept the fact that my name is Matt, I’m male, and I play the piano. What I’m talking about is an acceptance that you realize the problem is in your life is there to stay, and you need to make major changes to quickly and effectively solve that problem.

This is the part where people stumble. Instead of looking at the grand scheme of things and hammering away at solutions, they look solely at the problem. Whatever bad thing happened in their life angers them to no end. Because they’re so intently focusing on that one bad thing, it’s impossible for them to work through it. Don’t be one of these people.

Responsibility

Accept your life how it is. Take responsibility for whatever happened. Even if something awful happened that’s quite not your fault (e.g., you are fired from your job), accept that it happened. It’s in your life now. It’s your responsibility to take that misfortune and turn it into something greater.

Nobody else can change your bad situation into a fabulous situation. If you’re jobless, it’s your choices from here on out that determine your new job or new method of earning income. If you have a medical emergency, it’s your choices that will effect your quality of life, possibly for the rest of your life. If you want more happiness, you have to accept that you’re unhappy, and then take responsibility for your decisions here on out that can make you ecstatic about life.

This is another part where people totally stumble. They “get” the acceptance parts, they “understand” the responsibility aspect of this whole thing, but then they start pointing fingers. The blame game begins at full speed. For example, many people blame everything else – large companies, their friends, society’s standards of what’s beautiful – when trying to justify the fact that they’re overweight. But these people are completely wrong. It’s not the fast food company’s fault that you’re overweight and suffer from a low self esteem because of your body image. I wouldn’t even say it’s the fashion magazine’s fault. What you have is an acceptance and responsibility problem. Accept who you are, flaws and all. If you don’t like those flaws, take on the responsibility to change them.

Stop yourself from waiting on the permission of others to take charge of your life. That’s a classic symptom of total denial of responsibility. “I wish I could do X, but I’m waiting on Y to help me out first…” is a lie, 99% of the time. There might be some instances where you need another person’s specific help and you’ll be forced to wait on them until they have the time. However, most people use this as a bogus excuse to procrastinate.

Your decisions produce outcomes. Acceptance of how your life is right now and taking on the power of all that responsibility is what’s going to help you through the darkest hours of your life.

What are you putting off finally accepting as a reality in your life? How can you claim responsibility for what has happened and change it to what you dream of?

It’s your life. Your responsibility.