Life is a rollercoaster of ups and downs — great leaps forward, and unexpected, uncomfortable setbacks.
There are several questions and answers about why life shoots off in one direction or another — sky high or deep down. Most of them we don’t know and can’t control.
That’s the problem with life — everyone wants to control every aspect of their path and destiny. But, reality doesn’t work like that.
Most of us can control little in life — only our small sphere at home.
The rest happens randomly and gets thrown at our feet to deal with daily for better or worse.
Why then did I choose the title:
“Your Life & Happiness Are In Your Hands?”
I’m not looking to contradict myself or confuse you.
However, once you begin to understand what your life is about, what you’ve achieved or gone through, both positive and negative, you’ll realize what I say is true.
The cause and effect mostly come from you, your past actions, and your decisions.
We typically attribute positive developments and experiences to ourselves:
Our hard work, education, motivation, and model behavior to achieve what we want and feel we deserve.
Setbacks, such as trouble at work, losing a job, financial loss, losing a long-loved partner, getting seriously injured, and becoming stressed, unhealthy, with low energy, and worse, depressed, are always someone else’s fault.
In reality, most of what happens in life has little to do with others. Of course, there are negative situations that others can cause and make you suffer.
In my experience, the 2 most common areas of conflict and pain are your workplace and personal relationships.
I’ll provide 2 of life experience examples:
1 — Work Pain
I’ve been self-employed or freelancing for most of my life. Only once did I accept to be employed and work for a large corporation. That was hell!
I was a little down and out, struggling to get on my feet when I moved back from Bali to Florida. My cash flow wasn’t good — clients for my health coaching program trickled in very slowly.
At age 49, I took a degrading job as a floor salesman at a sporting goods store. I had an interview with the store manager — he was a pleasant guy and took an instant liking to me and offered me the job.
We were of similar age, yet I was far more experienced than him in sales, business, and sports. I was clearly overqualified for the job, and we both knew it.
I explained I would only stay for 3 to 6 months until I got my coaching business back up and running and I was back on my feet.
I started the following Monday. I met the assistant manager — what a nightmare that was. This sad excuse of a man was anxious, stressed, and constantly rude to the staff, including me.
He was 10 years younger than me, a total prick, and impossible to please.
He got off by treating employees like crap and acting like the big boss. He was horrible to deal with, and a nasty creep.
As you might imagine, I didn’t last long at this job. After 2 weeks of harassment and nasty snidey comments face to face or via the radio by this incompetent man, I had enough.
One morning, I took my radio and name badge off, dropped them both to his feet, told him to fuck off, and walked out the front door.
The last thing I remember was the staff clapping and cheering for me, shouting, “well done, Rob!”
My choices were:
Stay in this miserable job taking abuse from the nasty assistant manager, or move on, take the plunge back into freelancing, and work my ass off acquiring new clients.
I did the right thing by walking out and taking my future back into my hands — I was FREE!
Highly motivated and empowered to act fast, I soon found 4 new clients and my coaching business took off.
The lesson: Pain led to freedom by taking control of my destiny.
2 — Personal Relationship Pain
We can all agree that personal relationships are challenging to keep on track at the best of times, no matter how much you love each other.
But when things get tricky and misunderstandings arise, managing your situation can become extremely difficult, and stressful, and cause pain and disappointment.
The problems:
a) It’s nearly impossible to read your partner’s thoughts and emotions, and why they can change from one minute to the next.
b) Negative outside influences are constantly in play. Meaning — it’s a cruel and jealous world out there.
There’s so much jealousy from other men and women. Sadly, plenty of folks would love to see, even try to make your relationship fail, by sticking their noses in your business, and trying to do the same with other body parts!
Protecting your mental health and your partner from outside “relationship attacks” is tough. It takes a lot of patience and a calm and positive mindset to eliminate outside stressors.
Here’s an example from my past and last relationship that lasted 8 months, one and off:
My challenge: Jealous men were hitting on my girlfriend on social media, via messages, and even in person in front of me.
My choices: Leave her and let them win — fight back, and expose them as vultures and scum. I went for the latter!
Then, I worked patiently with my girlfriend by asking her to stop being gullible and allowing random Facebook followers to talk to her personally via DM.
She’s younger and somewhat naive. At first, she didn’t realize she was sending the wrong signals by chatting with these strangers making them believe she was interested in them.
She kept insisting that they were just Facebook friends, nothing more.
My response:
“No, these people are not your Facebook friends or any kind of friends. They are sneaky scumbags who try to steal and pick up other men’s women.”
I was right, of course. It didn’t take long for another 2 or 3 messages to flutter in asking my girlfriend to dinner, or worse, for her to visit and sleep with them!
The lesson: Other people caused us a lot of suffering and stress. I could not control what these people did.
I did, however, take control of the situation and us by helping to navigate my partner out and away from this horrible situation and bad people.
It worked well until it didn’t!
Rob
MBA from Robert Kennedy College & University of Cumbria, UK.
Certified Nutritionist & Health Coach | Trainer | Blogger | Copywriter | Author
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