Some people seem to live a charmed life. When they’d start talking about perspective or positive thinking, my eyes used to roll into the back of my head.
Yeah, sure.
It was easy for them to think positive. Easy for them to say that people like me just have bad attitudes. They hadn’t lived my life.
Of course, I hadn’t lived their lives either.
I’ve always been the girl with infinite sadness.
I used to believe that I had very little control over my own future. Life was something that happened to me, and it was usually something bad.
Good things happened to other people but not me.
It was easy to look at my life and feel despair. Easy to notice the generational poverty and dysfunction running rampant through my family.
Easy to feel sorry for myself when a childhood illness required me to have daily injections for about 7 years. I was deathly afraid of shots back then. It was easy to feel sorry for myself when I battled leg abscesses from those shots. Or when my doctor told me and my parents that my illness would make me overly sensitive for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t help but feel the pain.
My life was filled with sadness from a very young age. My best friend died in grade school. My mother constantly told me that she was dying.
I was still a child when I began hitting myself out of anger. Slapping my face any time that I didn’t know how to put a cap on my wild emotions.
Take it from somebody who has hated herself.
A destructive narrative replayed in my head again and again. And I had every right to tell myself that sad story, didn’t I? Both of my parents said and did cruel things to me when I was still young.
I was unlovable, and nobody gave me a chance to be anything else right out of the gate. That’s how the story would go.
Even in grade school, back when my teachers doted on me and told me that I was somebody good, I wound up unable to believe it because my peers hated me. They thought I was the teachers’ pet.
So, it didn’t matter who liked me because there was always somebody out there ready to tell me the truth: I was worthless. It might as well have been written in my DNA.
My saving grace came much later in my life… a crisis pregnancy at age 32. But I wouldn’t recognize its value right away because I wanted to kill myself through the whole thing. I kept hoping for some tragic accident to take my life. Or I hoped for a miscarriage.
I was so depressed that at one point during my pregnancy, the local police paid me a humiliating visit because somebody on Facebook reported that they were worried about me taking my life.
The pregnancy made me lie to the police, to therapists, and emergency room physicians. To my family and the very few people I called friends.
No, I didn’t really want to kill myself, I lied. I was just embarrassed that I’d been getting so emotional.
That was only half true.
The full truth was I kept Googling the least painless ways to die. I might have been less afraid of the pain if I hadn’t been pregnant. But I had deep fears about botching up my suicide and making somebody else suffer through the effects.
Taking control of my life saved it.
This pregnancy ultimately saved me because it finally gave me a sense of control over my life. No, I couldn’t control everything, but I suddenly found myself responsible for another life. That’s a kind of control.
An eerie one.
It was like I couldn’t help but shift my perspective once my life was no longer just about me.
Since I’ve been through so much extreme sadness, I never wanted my child to suffer through that too. Somehow, I decided to quit feeling so damn sorry for myself. It was getting me nowhere and I finally recognized that reality.
Instead, I told myself that I was going to use my shitty circumstances to turn my whole life around.
You can make healthier decisions.
“My whole approach in broadcasting has always been, ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.’ Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.” -Fred Rogers
After a few years of struggling through motherhood, I began to pay more attention to Mister Rogers. Sure, I was already trying to give my daughter a better life than anything I’d known.
But it was the teachings of Mister Rogers that helped me believe I could genuinely take control of my life. Well, him and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
A little over a year ago, I began watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with my daughter. When she spent time at her dad’s house, I also streamed Crazy Ex-Girlfriend while I worked on tasks for my social media clients.
One night, I kept replaying this song by Josh Groban from the show. It’s called The End of the Movie:
So this is the end of the movie
Whoa, whoa, whoa
But real life isn’t a movie
No, no, no
You want things to be wrapped up neatly
The way that stories do
You’re looking for answers
But answers aren’t looking for you
Because life is a gradual series of revelations
That occur over a period of time
It’s not some carefully crafted story
It’s a mess, and we’re all gonna die
If you saw a movie that was like real life
You’d be like, “What the hell was that movie about?
It was really all over the place.”
Life doesn’t make narrative sense
Nuh-uh
It’s funny how music and comedy can work together sometimes. I cried like a baby listening to that song. Replaying it over and over on Netflix. All day. All night.
In a very weird way, I knew that I had to get out of my own damn way if I was ever going to get anywhere good. I wrote about it on my WordPress blog and promised myself that I was going to pay more attention to Fred Rogers’ philosophy about taking positive action over my life.
That was on March 4, 2018. It would take me about 7 more weeks before I finally started writing on Medium, and about 9 more months before I finally began believing that I really have any control over my life.
You probably need a mantra.
There are a plethora of silly little mantras out there. Things we say to make ourselves feel better or help us to more easily cope with the hard stuff.
But I think there may just be one particular phrase that we all need to finally quit ruining our own lives:
I can’t do everything, but I can do something.
This is such a tiny little phrase and I know at face-value it sounds small and even trite. The truth, however, is that this is the kind of phrase that will change your life.
If you let it.
I know a lot of people who are stuck where I used to be. Stuck in this feeling that the odds are and have always been stacked against us.
From that point, we don’t believe that a positive perspective can do anything. In fact, we don’t believe in positivity at all.
Haven’t you seen what happened to us the last time we even tried to believe? All we did was fall on our face.
The truth is inconvenient. We don’t see where we’re standing in our own way. Sure, maybe we’d like to believe that we’ve got some bit of control over our destiny, but we don’t even know what that means.
When we hear folks talk about manifesting your dreams, we look at that in a literal way that’s pretty much doomed to break us.
We can’t control anything that happens to us.
As individuals, we are really only in control of two things: what we do and how we react.
What we do
When I say “what we do,” I’m actually talking about our conscious choices and actions. Even how we consciously think.
Everybody has 24 hours in each day. What we do basically amounts to however we choose to spend that time.
Work, play, family, dreams… whether we feel in control of our lives or not, we are constantly making choices. Constantly deciding what is worth our time or not.
How we react
When I talk about “how we react,” I’m talking about the way we view our lives.
Some people believe that life is purely what happens to us. I used to be one of those folks. My life was not my choosing (so I thought) because life kept giving me a bum deck of cards.
It doesn’t matter what analogy you use for your shitty life. Trust me, I’ve used them all. The point is that you refuse to believe you can take control of your own self. You let yourself get caught up in negative thinking.
Maybe it’s just easier that way. Whatever comes easy starts to rule your life.
And you know what’s really easy? Disappointment.
We are in control of what we do and how we react.
This is true whether we like it or not, and this is true whether we decide to take positive action or not.
I know firsthand just how easy it is to say that we don’t even have the luxury of positive thinking. As if dreams are reserved for those who already have what they need.
But I have also learned firsthand just how much a positive shift in our perspective can honestly change our lives.
Life is so much easier to navigate when you believe that you can do it. It’s crazy what a difference our mindset makes.
Yes, it takes audacity to think positively and acknowledge our power, but now that I know this? I wouldn’t have it any other way. It makes life taste better. It impacts everything.
You have the same choices as I do every single day. It’s true. Regardless of your circumstances, you can choose to see yourself as somebody who is going to beat the odds, or you can see yourself as somebody who is too broken beyond repair.
That’s how you get out of your own way. It’s surprisingly simple and empowering.
You need to understand what it means to be in control of your life.
If you don’t understand what control means, you will never actually get to use it. This is key.
True control is not:
- Having your way all of the time.
- Getting the precise results you envision.
- Unrealistic expectations.
- A life free from adversity.
True control is:
- Being open to possibility.
- Taking action to make your dreams happen.
- Setting honest expectations.
- Having the confidence to overcome adversity.
In other words, we’re not talking about wishing wealth into existence or pretending that the laws of the universe will go away.
Instead, taking control of your life is more like learning how to work with the universe, and how to find happiness in the middle of that journey. Even if you’re not there yet.
Every time you reject the value of positive thinking combined with positive action, you are standing in your own way.
That’s not the universe conspiring against you. Reality isn’t standing in your way.
That’s you.
You are standing in your way when you decide that good things happen to everybody else but you.
Every day that you decide to not take action to achieve your dreams, that’s on you too.
That’s a damn hard pill to swallow. I know this because I’ve been there, and in some ways, I’m still there.
Most people don’t have ALL their shit together.
I am convinced that nobody can juggle everything all of the time. There is always some ball that is going to fall. Maybe more than one.
These days, I have got a ton of positivity working for me. I am in greater control of my life than I ever was before, and that’s not because any of my circumstances changed. It’s because I changed.
In some ways, I decided to quit living like life just happened to me. I started writing and decided not to give up on building my own career. I’m still in the midst of that journey, but it’s gone better than I ever could have imagined because I have repeatedly made positive choices to take action.
I can’t control whether or not people like my work. But I can control how hard I work and what kind of attitude I have through all of it.
Even so, I still struggle to take control of my life in other areas. Like my weight. What I should do is apply the same audacity I use in my writing career to losing weight and keeping it off.
But I’m not there yet.
I’m still standing in my own way every time I get stuck in my thoughts that it’s unfair I have PCOS and lipedema. Every time I focus on having genes that suck instead of focusing on whatever positive action I can take, I am blocking my success.
There’s no point in denying any of that.
How do we get to the point where we stop shooting ourselves in the foot?
I think we have to become more afraid of doing nothing than doing something. Or in other words, we have to believe that taking positive action is more powerful than moping around doing nothing.
That’s how I got to the point of beginning my own writing career. Once I finally quit blaming the universe for the crummy circumstances at work, I realized it was now or never.
I was lucky because my daughter added some urgency to the equation. If I didn’t sort my shit out she’d be homeless too.
So, I quit wearing a chip on my shoulder and decided to change my perspective. For her. In my mind, it became more powerful to do one small thing than to worry that my efforts might be meaningless.
Getting out of your own way means changing what you fear.
People born into a poverty mindset tend to fear failure to the point of never trying. And on the rare cases where we do try, we typically convince ourselves that any flop is just more proof of our sweeping narrative of failure.
It’s hard to get back up after failure when we lack a growth mindset that says, oh well, maybe next time. We don’t want to learn from our mistakes because life is already way too hard. We need a break we never seem able to get.
No, we get so fixated on our negative results that it’s all we can see. We don’t bother because we see no point in making an effort.
And we don’t see the failures of those whom we observe to be “winning.” We don’t learn from wherever they’ve been because all we see is a more or less charmed life that has had it so easy.
Our fear of failure is an irrational fear. It is the fear that keeps us stuck.
We have to shift the way we perceive failure. That means we let ourselves be more afraid of not trying. More scared of doing nothing. More afraid of missing out on a grand adventure.
The only magic trick you will ever need…
If you can learn how to turn a negative outcome into a positive opportunity, it will transform your life. It’s amazing.
Failure from going after a dream is no longer a failure when you’ve actually learned something from the experience. Every time you wipe out, you gain a piece of new information. You can use that new information to keep trying until you do succeed.
That’s the only magic in positive thinking. Good things don’t happen because you wish they would. You don’t wish things into existence. Good things happen because you quit telling yourself the same sad story about your cursed life.
Instead, you start looking for ways to take even the smallest bit of positive action. You begin believing that you’ve actually got a fighting chance in this life. And then you quit letting yourself make excuses.
You start allowing yourself to fail. Start opening yourself up to greater possibilities. You shift your entire notion of “control” to recognize that you’ve got some choices after all.
You make a choice every day to fight for a more helpful and positive mindset until one day you realize it’s become your new normal.
All Rights Reserved for Shannon Ashley
Productivity Hub 