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Who is the king of your life’s castle? If your answer isn’t a whole hearted, “It’s me!” then something needs to change.
For a long time I lived my life as a subject in my own kingdom – not only was I living on someone else’s terms, but I had given away the power to really rule my own life to others because I really didn’t want that responsibility. Because of this, my actions were all reactive instead of proactive, yet I couldn’t figure out why I always felt like I was treading water. It seemed like I was being moved around by forces beyond my control – circumstance, chance, change, and cruel fate – and there was nothing I could do.
How many of you have felt the same way? I’m willing to bet that all of you have, at some point in your life.
As Uncommoners, many of us feel these larger forces as impassible roadblocks to living uncommonly. While we want to break free to pursue our passions, we feel our hands tied by things like finances, responsibility, and cultural pressure. Another common force we point to as controlling our direction is the expectations of others – our parents, our spouses, even our friends. We feel the pressure of their dreams holding us into situations we don’t want to be in, and so we sit down, shrug our shoulders, and say, “I would like to live differently, but there is nothing I can do.”
Yes there is – take back your throne.
The Abdication of Power
It is easy to forget that we are all born with a power inside us. And while this power may not be to shoot lasers out of our eyes or fly with red capes on, it is still a super power: the power to control our own lives. Unlike animals who are instinctively programmed to hunt, hibernate, or swim upstream to mate, we have the ability to control just about every aspect of our lives. We can choose what clothes we wear, who we love, what we do with our bodies, what we create, what we destroy, and what we contribute. Our power is the ability to design our lives, from the day to day to the big picture, in our own vision.
Yet a common reaction I get when I give my rant about the human super power is the fact that regardless of what we want for ourselves, things happen to us outside of our control that reduce our choices and take away some of our power. Things like debilitating illnesses, family crises, financial crises, war, or smaller things like children being born, job promotions or firings, and divorce. How can we maintain absolute rule in our kingdom when things keep happening to us?The truth is these things will take away our power – if we let them.
Right now we live in a world where taking responsibility for your own happiness – well, actually where taking responsibility for anything – is not very popular. Instead of thinking, wow, maybe I shouldn’t have taken a huge chug out of that mug of hot coffee we are quick to sue to coffee vendor for the burns in our mouth. Instead of disciplining our children and teaching them how to be well functioning members of society we pump them full of ADHD drugs and tell them to stop bothering us and go play their X-Box.
Every day, people all around us – and even ourselves – abdicate our power by not taking personal responsibility for our own situations.
Imagine this: you’re on the train going to work, and the conductor comes on and says the train is delayed and will be at least 15 minutes late. You roll your eyes and curse the train. Why is this always happening to you? Now you will be late, your boss will be pissed, and you can just tell it’s going to be a bad day. You cross your arms around your chest and start thinking about all the things around you that are keeping you from having a good day, working yourself into your bad mood. By the time the train does get to the station you are feeling victimized, beyond annoyed, and ready to be upset the whole day.
This used to happen to me all the time. I was upset about my corporate job, and blamed the fact that I needed the money for why I had to be there. When the train would be late, I would think, “Great, something else going wrong,” and start preparing myself for a miserable day. I was painfully ignorant to the fact that I was empowering these things to cause me distress by relinquishing my responsibility in my own life.
Internal Versus External
I want to take a quick minute to share with you guys the story of Viktor Frankl. Frankl was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII because he was a Jew. Aside from the constant fear of death, there was random torture, beatings, emotional abuse, and a prevailing sense that prisoners were not human beings, they were less than dirt. Yet Frankl, a renowned psychotherapist, has spoken countless times on how some of his greatest experiences were in those camps.
While this statement sounds almost perverse, it is true. Frankl looks back on those times as some of the most profound of his life because he discovered something: in spite of the things the Nazi’s could do to him, he was the one who had the ultimate power over himself. His internal sense of purpose, life’s mission, and power could never been taken away from him, regardless of the external atrocities committed against him.
Frankl discovered that he was the king of his castle, and the only way anyone could take that power away was if he willingly abdicated the throne.
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to the same idea when she said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
The human super power is an internal power – it means while we can’t control all of the things that happen to us, we can control how we respond to them through our perception and our actions.
It makes you think that if Frankl can proactively deal with his horrible situation, we can find ways to deal with our relatively less severe lots in life.
Taking Back the Throne
The choice is ours: we can let ourselves be pushed to and fro by the forces around us that try to dictate our life, or we can choose to empower ourselves to be proactive in our interpretation and movement through the world.
Here are some points to help guide you in your efforts to take back your kingdom from those forces that would try to rob you of that power:
- Think influence – Focus on the aspects of a situation you can control. If you are having a hard time identifying what those things are, write out a list of all the factors affecting a situation and circle the ones that involve how you act or respond. The rest is out of your influence, and therefore out of your kingdom.
- Monitor your feelings – Be wary of negative emotions such as frustration, anger, and hopelessness. When you feel them starting to manifest, try to step back and ask yourself what their source is.
- Know your strengths – Take the time to write out your list of strengths, including your physical and emotional assets. This will help you understand more about what you have control over and where you real sources of power lie.
- Start with small acts of power – Sometimes just doing something miniscule, such as choosing what you eat or how you wear your hair, can help you reclaim a piece of your power. They can also help you build up to larger acts of personal power.
- Stop the blame game – Anytime you have the urge to blame someone else or something else for the things in your life, imagine a huge, red stop sign and scream STOP to yourself. Then try to reframe the thought to how you can proactively move forward – blaming other things or people will get you nowhere you want to go.
- Don’t ruminate – what’s done is done, and all you can do is choose what to do next. Ruminating about what has happened is a useless and frustrating exercise that will only promote negative, powerless thought.
- Eliminate “Would have” and “Should Have” from your vocabulary – Some people like to think about the way things “should” or “would” be if past actions had gone differently. “I would have been making so much more money if Jane hadn’t got the promotion instead of me.” “Things shouldn’t be like this, I should be the one ending the relationship…”
- Be conscious of your self talk – You wouldn’t believe the things that we’ll say to ourselves when we think we aren’t listening. Police your own thoughts to keep that nasty little voice we all have inside from becoming the dominant one.
- Plan on happiness – When you look ahead to tomorrow, next week, and next year, consciously plan on being happy. Write it on your to-do list just like you would write down you tasks for the day: “wash the car, pick up the dry cleaning, be happy, go to the grocery store…”
- Be a Have, not a Have Not – This piece of advice is as old as time, but it bears repeating: stop worrying about what you don’t have and concentrate on what you do have. Feeling like you don’t have what you need or want is a powerless feeling, because you are giving those wanted objects the power over you. You can want things, of course you can, but be sure you also are appreciative and thankful for what you do have. A bird in the hand is another piece of personal power.
The Moral of the Story
What it comes down to, fellow Uncommoners, is that in order for us to lead our best lives we need to take responsibility for our own feelings of happiness, worth, and success. Those who venture off the beaten path need to have a strong sense of personal power in order to get where they need to go.
Each one of us has a great power inside of us that is just waiting to be nurtured and strengthened. I’m not saying it is easy – in fact, finding the source of that power and making it flourish is a laborous journey of self discovery. But it is more worth it than you can imagine, and I promise you it will make your uncommon life that much more fulfilling and that much more attainable.
So don’t fear personal responsibility. It is scary to look at your life, especially if there are things you really don’t like about it right now, and say “I am the only one who can clean this up.” It is a lot of weight on your shoulders, and sure it is easier to share that weight with other people or situations.
But this is your castle, and if you need to share the responsibility, then you are also sharing the right to decide what to do with the kingdom. In other, non-metaphorical words, if you persist in blaming other people or things for your current unwanted situation, you are giving those people or things the power to tell you how to live your life. And I am 100% certain that none of us want to share that right.
So, I ask you once again, who’s the king of your castle?
