It Is Your Life To Decide

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

It's easy to feel misunderstood. It's easy to feel like the world does not see you for who you are. We all have this idea of who we are, but most of us are wrong. A lot of us either see that we are more capable, nicer, more loving. More thoughtful than we really are, and the others see themselves as no good, worse than they truly are. They believe that they're no good at anything, not capable of anything,

aren't able to achieve or succeed at something. We all have tendencies to evaluate ourselves as either better or worse than we actually are. But in reality, we're all floating around the middle to varying degrees. And to add even more complexity to the situation, the people that believe that they are better than they actually are end up doing better and the people that believe that they are doing worse than others actually get worse. So these become these self-fulfilling prophecies.

We end up foreshadowing our own demise or success. But the only thing that can be said for sure is that we're all changing and we are never really one person and who we are changes all the time and can change at different speeds for people. Some people are more consistent, whereas other people change fairly rapidly. Some people take great pride in the fact that they change and develop and grow.

And other people take great pride in the fact that they've always remained the same and been very consistent. And there isn't necessarily a right and a wrong way. It's just two different perspectives and two different experiences.

I can think of pros and cons for both. I tend to be somebody who is always growing always pushing for an incremental improvement however that also comes with perfectionism that comes with chasing an ever-moving target and never really being satisfied whereas being consistent in who you are and not changing limits your experience and you end up normally getting stuck in the comfort zone you know you make things how you want them and then you never want them to change and things always

change so you're fighting against an inevitable thing that's going to happen you're just trying to prolong it for as long as possible it makes you stubborn and immalleable it's very easy to get stuck whether that's stuck doing the same thing every day or stuck in your ways where you feel like you know everything because you don't and never can.

The truth is, the answer is, as it always is, is balance. Finding some mode between knowing what is right for you and being consistent and showing up for yourself in a consistent manner and being flexible enough to recognize when you're wrong and be able to adapt and change as you need to. It doesn't mean that you should always be pursuing something but it also means that you should be open to change.

Instead of investing all your effort in trying to fortify your life to make sure it doesn't change, we should be increasing our capability to adapt when it does. Anytime that you jump to one of the extremes, the answer is going to get more and more incorrect. The answer will always be somewhere in the middle.

So now we've at least identified that we don't really know ourselves and by the time you get to know yourself you've probably changed in the process and we can begin to redefine our relationship with ourselves by modifying the questions that we ask ourselves instead of saying you know what do I like to do which is a question based on history instead ask a question as what do I want to do now it's only a subtle rephrasing, but it removes the assumption that we know ourselves.

Most of our day-to-day thoughts and actions stem from our patterns. And once you begin to undo those patterns and remove that groove that they've formed, it's almost like ski tracks down a slope where everyone's gone the same way and it's created these grooves in your brain where you are used to following the same path and using the same track. And the reason we do this is a survival mechanism.

We know and can predict the outcome of where this lies even something as simple as constantly choosing the same thing at a restaurant because you know that it's good and gets reliable results the chance of it going wrong is decreased because we have experience with it and if we get something that we haven't had before maybe we don't like it and that's the exact same way we fall into our patterns of behavior we might even know that they're incorrect or not

the best thing for us but because it's familiar and we have experience with it it feels safe to us and that's why we keep making those decisions even if it's something that harms us it still feels safer to us than the unknown and the unknown might be not doing that thing that is harming you whether that's eating junk food or smoking cigarettes or drinking or whatever it is that to you is at least familiar it's comfortable and we don't know what it's like without all that stuff and

that actually seems more scary even though we know these things are harming us the thought of experiencing life without these things that feels worse to us even though we know it would be an improvement on our lives it feels worse so you end up getting tricked by all of these ingrained patterns that you keep repeating every day and it might not necessarily be something that you want to do or that you agree with doing but.

Just because you have simply done it for a long time it has become a part of your idea of your mode of existence that is safe and happy and you might not be happy with it. Just safe. It feels okay. You know what you're getting, you know the kind of day you're going to have, and it's not that bad. And that is comfort. Having a reliable and consistent experience, you have to pick the amount of risk that you want to exist with. Really, in reality, you risk existing every day.

Any day could be your last, any moment could be your last, and that is the real risk of being alive is that at any moment in time it could end and we have no control over it but it's obvious to everyone that you can create some kind of safety that you can make it so that you are preserving your life in little ways by eating well and running that doesn't ensure that you don't die early or you know a meteor doesn't come and

crush you or a bus doesn't hit you but it does provide the best chance of surviving well when you look after your body when you treat yourself well that gives you the greatest chance of surviving for longer so you can play that kind of odds and risks game where if you take risks.

The biggest risks where you have a chance of something excellent on the other side, like the best thing ever, is going to have the downside of catastrophic failure, either by feeling like you've missed out on the best thing ever or some consequences where it all goes wrong. To avoid this, you can not take large risks and you can kind of just live your life at a happy medium where you've got enough so that you're not absolutely miserable, but you don't have the things that you might want in life.

You don't experience the kind of things that you want to experience. You're not pursuing or working on the things that you want to work on.

You don't risk enough that you can win in some big way, but you're also not risking enough so that you lose in some big way it's not going to go so wrong but it's also not going to go so right and this is in some way balanced however you can also have big ups and big upside and big downside and go all through the ranges of emotions and experiences that life has to offer and also be balanced things could go really wrong and then really right for you and then you know

be a complete mixed bag of lefts and rights and ups and downs. That is in itself also a form of balance. So we can see that there isn't this right or wrong way. There are opposite ways but that doesn't make them wrong. Something can be wrong and right at the same time. The same thing as two opposite things can also be right.

So instead of living in a way where we feel like we must be accurate and get things right and make the right decision we can instead detach from the result and set our intention to do what we feel is right.

And right for us and what we want to be doing and that's it let go we can't control the outcome we can't guarantee the result all we can do is choose what kind of life that we want to have we can choose to take risks we can choose to experience or we can choose to stay in comfort but it's the same decision between the bliss of ignorance and the pain of knowledge you can choose whether you have a exciting exhilarating purposeful life and you can choose whether you have a peaceful

happy life they are different paths and there isn't someone who should be saying what is the right way and what is the wrong way there is only your way and the way that you want to experience things and people won't agree I probably won't agree and I wouldn't agree with my current view and outlook of what how life should be lived 20 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago or a year ago like it changes constantly as i have new information and new experiences to base off the idea of trying

to be right and trying to get life right and win life as if there is a way that it can be lived where we get a gold star at the end and say congratulations you did it you lived the good life there is no such thing you live. Your life by your choices and you experience what you choose to experience there.

Are lots of things that you didn't choose about life there are things that you were born into and the circumstances and environment that you were born into but the variables of your specific existence don't really come into play. What matters is how you choose to make the most of the existence that you've been given, how you choose to proceed through life and what you believe is valuable and what gives you purpose.

These are all things that you yourself pick and the more you begin to take responsibility for that, to take ownership of your life and say hey if I'm not happy if I'm not happy with who I am or what I'm doing that's on me and I need to change myself I need to make sure that I am putting myself first and I'm doing what I need to do to get closer to the experience that I want to have you either admit to yourself that you don't truly want what you say you want and that you might say that I want to

be strong but you don't want to go through difficult times which are going to make you strong you might say that you want to be smart but you don't want to read books and do things that make you more intelligent and challenge you mentally. If you're not making these decisions, you have to choose whether it's because you don't really want it or because you're scared and comfortable and you don't want to really change because you don't want to risk things going too wrong.

But going through your days, ignoring how you feel and ignoring what you want and ignoring your inaction and unwillingness to change, you will remain stuck.

And that could be stuck in a comfortable spot or it could be stuck in a place of constant suffering just because it's not your fault that doesn't mean it's not your responsibility and if it's your life and loads of bad things have happened and that's forced your hand to live life in a certain way but you recognize that it's not optimal or it's not the life that you want to be living the only person that is going to be able to change that is you so it is your responsibility and you

must hold yourself accountable and say I'm going to do everything I can within my power to experience life the way I want to experience it and anytime I'm doing something that I feel is holding me back from that or preventing me from doing that I'm going to make sure to take a corrective measure and change. Thank you for listening.