Most people live day after day, in the hope that happiness will eventually come.
The truth is simple: it simply won’t.
From my personal experience, I know how it feels to live a life that you don’t desire. Two years ago, I was working at a place in which I could not impose myself. My day started with thoughts of worry and ended with feelings of loneliness. I used my free time to avoid my pain, investing my earnings into distractions and intoxication. And all of that with the hope that this is just a phase, that it will pass and that my ideal life will eventually show up.
But it didn’t. And then I had a breakdown.
What changed afterwards was that I started prioritizing my happiness above everything else. And by doing that, I became conscious of why I acted the way I did, and changed the underlying purposes of my daily actions.
Exercising control over which force guides your actions is the only way to change your life.
Most of us aren’t even aware of the fact that something guides us, because it seems so natural to continue acting the same way. Yet all of our actions have a guiding force: fear or integrity, rejection or openness, escape or confrontation, hate or love. And therefore, the only way to change your way of thinking, deciding and acting is to change the force that guides you.
Guiding forces are values that drive your life. People tend to follow one of three types of forces:
- Negative guiding forces, such as fear, shame, guilt, escaping, or hate, will make you live a life full of excuses for being miserable.
- Indifference as a guiding force, the act of not taking stances and letting life be imposed on you, will make you an observer instead of an actor of your life, living in a vegetable state in which the question of happiness will not even occur to you.
- Positive guiding forces, such as love, pride, magic, joy, bliss, and harmony, will give your life meaning, joy, and value.
The key to changing your life is understanding your drives and making a conscious decision to change them.
Picture the same normal day lived twice. First, driven by anger, indifference, lack of integrity, judgment, escape and fear. Then the identical circumstances, re-lived with gratefulness, self-care, the desire to give, vulnerability, playfulness and excitement to be alive.
What matters is not your life circumstance. It’s the intentions you set for your actions that will make you feel great or miserable.
So why do most people continue a life driven by fear, doubt and escaping?
- People don’t make their happiness their number one priority. If you don’t ask yourself how you want your life to unfold, you won’t put any effort into consciously choosing how you want to act.
- People are not honest towards themselves. Lack of vulnerability will make you avoid painful confrontation with reality, but it will never give you a joyful life in the long run.
- People don’t take action. You might be aware of your guiding forces, but find comfort in the situation you’re in. Without action, no change.
It’s clear that changing one’s life is not easy. It requires effort, confrontation, and some initial pain. But all it takes is to take it step by step, to tackle your life areas one at a time. And then, life will happen for you, not to you.
Even if it takes time to change your entire life, there is one thing you can do now: ask yourself in which life area you are driven by fear, shame, guilt or judgment, and take the decision to change how you want to act in the future.
And then, you will finally be able to be yourself.