At some point in our lives, we’ve all wanted change, we’ve all wanted our lives to be different in one way or another. Some people want a new, better-paying job. Some people want to lose weight. Others want to fix their family dynamic. Still, others want to get over whatever emotional issues they may be dealing with. All these changes are fine and great, but when are you going to start doing the work to transform your life? That’s the big question.
Most people want change, but most people aren’t willing to do what it takes to see that change come to fruition.
We all want our lives to be better, but what are you willing to do to make that happen?
Depression kept me trapped in a dark cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy as a result of my thinking patterns. One bad thing happened and I held onto it a little bit. Then another circumstance occurred and I held onto that, and then another and another.
Each time I held onto pieces of those situations, I slowly began to incorporate the anger or frustration, sadness, grieving, bitterness, shame, or whatever else I may have been feeling at the time, into the fabric of my being.
Over time, I embodied those emotions regularly and they began to express themselves as depression and anxiety. I was suicidal. I got to the point where I hated life, I didn’t want to live. In my mind, I thought everyone felt like I did and didn’t understand how anyone was ever able to carry on, let alone enjoy life.
I wished things would get better. Hoped they would get better. I even prayed they would get better, and would imagine what life would be like if it would just go my way.
However, it took me a long time to get to the place where I realized that I needed to start doing the work if I wanted to get better.
Instead of wishing things would get better, I had to start figuring out how to get better. What does getting better even mean? Does it mean having a better job? I thought maybe that would help, but over time, regardless of where I worked, I still felt miserable.
Different locations than where I normally lived or worked didn’t make a difference either. Going on a trip meant getting some relief for a while, but as they say, “Wherever you go, there you are” always seemed to ring true.
Therapy helped a little because I was able to make more sense of why someone might act the way they do, but it still didn’t keep them from doing it, and thus, I was still frustrated.
Finally, I realized that it wasn’t everything around me that was the problem.
It wasn’t my job, or friends and family, it wasn’t my circumstances and situations.
I was the problem.
Are You the Problem?
Do you constantly wish, hope, and pray that your life gets better, or the relationship issue you’re dealing with will magically heal itself? Are you waiting for the perfect job to fall into your lap? Is your mindset one that says you’re okay, it’s everything else around you that needs to be fixed or adjusted?
If you are, that’s okay. I was there myself. Many people are.
But how long do you think you can go with that same mindset before things start to change for the better?
Change is inevitable, but will it be for the better or the worse?
“Change before you have to.”
– Jack Welch
Waiting for things to change, in my experience, generally didn’t lead to the outcomes I had hoped for. Things either stayed the same or got worse.
It wasn’t until I made the decision to work on myself that things truly started to get better.
People may have hurt you. Life may not have gone how you had hoped and circumstances and situations didn’t go your way, and as a result, you may feel lost and hopeless.
Those things didn’t get you to the place you are now. Your thinking did.
Now, those situations may have influenced your thinking, but you’re the one responsible for your thoughts, which result in actions or a lack thereof.
Before I could even start my journey of healing and overcoming depression, I first had to realize I was depressed. I had to accept that this is where I am right now in my life.
Initially, I started taking medication to see if that would help, but SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) are really just band-aids for the underlying emotional problems or issues.
They did help a little, but over time I found I was merely taking a medicine that either left me feeling not quite myself, or they felt like they did nothing at all with added side effects.
It wasn’t until I started working on myself that I started to see change. But I had to accept where I was on my journey. I had to accept the person I had become and decide that I no longer wanted to live that way.
The hard part was I didn’t really know who I was. I had been depressed for so long, I didn’t know how to be me without thinking and feeling the way I did. But I knew something had to change. The following four quotes sum up the experience I was about to have which would span almost ten years.
“The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.”
– Tony Robbins
I thought the journey was impossible, but I did begin.
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It got to the point where I finally decided I no longer wanted to live the life I was living.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
– Teddy Roosevelt
I didn’t have much, but I did start making small adjustments here and there.
“We design our lives through the power of choices.”
– Richard Bach
I began learning how to make different and better choices than I had been making.
If You Want to Change, Start Now
The longer you wait, the longer you’ll continue to deal with whatever you’re dealing with.
Usually, people start the process of change but then fall back to their old habits or patterns. It’s not easy to re-write your story, especially if there is a lot of history holding you to it.
However, it’s not impossible. As Aristotle said…
“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
– Aristotle
The more I practiced being the person I wanted to be, the better I got at it. The better I got at it, the easier it was to practice being that person. Over and over the cycle continued.
I found opportunities all over the place that allowed me to practice becoming who I wanted to be. It wasn’t easy, especially in the beginning, because I was so used to being the person who practiced being depressed, or anxious.
As time went on, I was like a turtle slowly poking its head out from beneath its shell to see if it was safe to come out.
Gradually, remember, this was close to a ten-year process for me, I began to change. My mindset began to shift. I no longer saw myself as the same person. I started to realize that I wasn’t depressed, not the real me. Depression was a facade I had been wearing because I had practiced that emotional output for such a long time.
There was a lot of work that went into me overcoming depression and anxiety.
In the beginning, I didn’t want to do the work. It was too hard. How do you turn the Titanic at the last minute to avoid hitting the iceberg? That’s what it felt like. It was daunting and seemed impossible.
But it wasn’t impossible.
It was tough. It wasn’t easy by any means.
I spent a lot of time soul-searching and understanding how I even got to that state in the first place. Once I realized the how and why, and how to combat it in the future, I started making headway.
Slowly at first, and over time it began to pick up speed.
I noticed I was able to shift my thinking more quickly than I had been able to previously.
Instead of taking weeks, or months, to pull myself out of my depressive mindset, it started taking days to weeks. From there it went from hours to days, and then to minutes to hours.
Now, and thank God for this, I can go days, weeks, and even months without feeling depressed at all. There are times when I might start to feel depressed, but I catch it, turn my mindset around, and go in a new direction. There have been a few instances where I have felt depressed for several hours or half a day or so, but those have been few and far between.
Generally speaking, depression doesn’t have a stranglehold on me any longer.
Are You Ready to Do the Work?
Anything worth accomplishing in life takes work. I don’t care what it is you’re trying to do. Even if you want to go down the route of manifesting your dream life, it’s going to take work. Yes, even manifesting takes work.
The reason changing your life takes work is that you are attempting to go from one place, or state of mind, to another. Thus the euphemism, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.
You can’t expect everything to fall into place just because you tried a few times, or you willed it into being.
Look at any respectable person in their chosen field. They didn’t get to where they are by merely wishing, hoping, and praying to be successful in their endeavors. They put in the work needed to get to where they are now.
Even people teaching how to manifest didn’t get to where they are without work. Books don’t write themselves. Seminars don’t come with pre-packed speaking ideas. The idea of manifesting may have assisted them in getting to where they wanted to go, but they still had to put effort into something. Meditating, reading, learning, whatever…
Someone in excellent shape didn’t get that way by going to the gym once.
Successful business people didn’t start a business and have a million dollars in their bank account after one day.
Overcoming your issues and struggles isn’t going to happen in one day either. It may not happen in a week. It might not happen in a month, and you may not see the results you’re hoping for in a year.
You can cut down on the amount of time it takes to go from point A to point B, but that depends on how much time you put into doing the work.
Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about this quite a bit (You can read more articles where I mention his work HERE and HERE). In the quantum realm, time works differently, so if you can access the quantum realm, you can speed up your results. However, to get to that place you have to…guess what…work!
How much time does it take you to move through space to get from point A to B? If you walk out to your car, it will take you approximately a few seconds, to minutes, to hours, depending on where you are and where your car is parked. That is moving through space within the confines of time.
Dr. Dispenza talks about how in the quantum realm the distance between points A and B are collapsed, so they’re essential next to each other. This means it takes less time to move through space to reach your goal. This is the idea behind manifesting.
However, in his courses, he teaches that you have to do the work of learning how to get to that place. His method is through the use of meditation. Learning to meditate so that you get out of the way, which opens up new possibilities in your life.
Think about it, if you could learn how to become unrestricted in your thinking, how much easier would it be to say yes to certain opportunities and no to others? You don’t have baggage holding you back out of fear, or keeping you where you are so you can feel safe.
Most people don’t like change, but many of us need to experience change so that we can live a more joyful and peaceful life. Something else to note regarding change is that when you start to change, it starts to change the world of those around you, and that can rock the boat. Not only will you have difficulty with it, but your family and friends may have difficulty with it as well.
What you need to ask yourself is this, “What’s worse, the pain of change, or the pain of staying the same?”.
As I’ve mentioned before, you’re going to experience pain in life no matter what. We can either choose to embrace the pain, make the changes needed, and move on with life, or we continue to embrace our suffering.
The choice is yours. Nobody is going to force you to do it.
So…
When are you going to start doing the work?
Much love to you all.
Josiah
