How to Change Your Life

While at a client site the other day, one of the employees and I got into a conversation.  They wanted to change their job, they were unhappy with their situation, and they felt unsure as to what they really wanted to be doing with themselves.

“I want to change my life, but I just don’t know how.”

I have heard people say almost this identical phrase hundreds of times over the past few years. The desire for living a different life, being a different person, doing different work is there, but how to bridge the gap between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow seems like a complete mystery.

There are millions of things that you can do every day to change your life. This site – and many other – share countless of things you can do to make changes.  For each person, what will change their life will be a different thing or a different combination of things.

There is only one universal element that everyone needs to know and understand to truly change their life: the power is yours to do so.

Accepting Responsibility

The power to change your life is a two part order: the first is to accept responsibility for that power.  To change your life, you need to understand that you hold the ultimate responsibility for whether you are happy, sad, angry, or depressed.

Sure, there are lots of things that can happen to you in life that can test your mettle and effect your circumstances.  You could have health problems, you could live through a natural disaster, you could experience tragic loss, your business could fail through no fault of your own.  Some people suffer abuse, are born with disabilities, or are the victims of a heinous crime.

And while you can’t control what has happened to you, you can control how you move forward from it. There are thousands – no, hundreds of thousands – of stories of people who experience the most heinous situations life throws at them and still manage to be happy, contributing, and successful in spite of it. Are they the lucky ones? Are they somehow different from you or me? No – they simply have accepted responsibility for being happy/successful/fulfilled.

Taking responsibility for your happiness means that no matter what happens, you understand that at the end of the day no matter what the world does to you, the ultimate deciding factor for what your life looks like is in your hands.

Be Proactive

The second part of the universal element for changing your life is to be proactive. Being proactive means that you wake up everyday with the conscious intention to improve your situation.  This means you research what will be effective, you study how to do it, and then you actively implement it.

You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control what actions you take after to get to a better place.

Maybe you have a serious health condition – what can you do to start improving it? What therapies are out there to relieve your symptoms, heal your body, or prevent further sickness?

Maybe you experience a tragic loss – what can you do to start healing? In what ways can you make peace with the universe and honor the memory of what was lost? What can you do to start looking ahead?

Maybe you were laid off through no fault of your own – what can you do to get back out into the workforce? How can you turn this into an experience that will work in your favor when it comes time to be hired again?


To change you life, you must be willing to go out and get what you want or search until you find what you want. Change will not come to you, at least not the type of change you want.  If you are a passive player in your own life, you will get what you get. However, if you are a proactive player, you can determine exactly what you get.

It is that simple, and that hard.

Putting it together

So the formula for how anyone can change their life is this:

accept responsibility for your happiness/success + be proactive to make change happen = a changed life

Of course, there are specific strategies and steps you can take to be proactive and be comfortable with that responsibility.  But when it comes to the question of “How can I change my life?” this formula is the only universal answer.

At the end of the day it comes down to fact that the power lies totally in your hands. You can either let the world around you define you, or you can actively and consciously go out and define yourself in spite of the world.  I have found that when people start to do the latter, they start to experience that sensation that their life is changing for the better.

Are you ready to change your life?

Here’s to your Uncommon Life,

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