Stop Selling Yourself Short
There is a thrill in chasing greatness. For as long as I can remember my life has been a battle towards freedom. Throughout the journey, I have cycled between being a doer and a settler. Times of persistence, routine, and passion. Times of giving up, rationalization, and dullness. The problem with being the settler in my case is the fact that I usually end up resenting being the settler.
I resent not waking up on time, even though the night before I planned on mastering my morning before getting down to business for the day. I resent skipping important parts of my routine like journaling or trigger point therapy. Especially when I opt out of that and replace it with Netflix and ice cream. What really irks me the most when I become the settler is my future self looking back on what I didn’t do, the regret of knowing I could have made my day better if I just would have done the said things I skipped out on.
It’s either a case of major FOMO or I am realizing that my actions, routines, choices and habits have consequences. I am wrestling with the fact that my life is entirely my responsibility.
This ultimately is why I am even writing this in the first place. It’s an act of responsibility, it's the reflection of myself that I seek. When I see it, there is no “excuse” card to play, and my only choice is to continue in the pursuit of greatness.
Around age 19 I became fascinated with personal development. I created routines, read books, journaled, reflected, and deployed the strategies I learned to ensure that I was the one making the decisions in life. The reason I say this is due to the fact that most of us live with the opinions of others guiding us throughout life.
Teachers, leaders, role models, celebrities, influencers, spiritual gurus, and more. All of these philosophies, choices, and fractals of decisions we could make. All of the data, literature, movies, music videos, and beyond, guiding us to side with it.
It all becomes a bit overwhelming…
I realized that for most of my life I was probably not in complete control of my own mind. This thus meant I was probably not in control of all of my habits, which led to my actions and led to my results.
If I wanted new results, I had to do something about the input of the data flowing through me. The result of changing this input was new habits, which led to new actions and new results. My routines, reading, journaling, and conscious decision making changed my outcomes.
Along the way, I met a lot of people who were also on a similar path. The path of bettering oneself. I also encountered people who disagreed with the path. They would deem it as stressful, preoccupied, and almost selfish. How could you spend so much time working on yourself?
Well, I guess my honest response would be, how could you not spend time working on yourself?
To be human is to error. In life, we will encounter challenges, opposition, and struggle. If we expect to be able to interact and maneuver through these cycles we better be sure we are in our best state of mind.
How do we achieve the best state of mind? Well, I’d say it's a mixture of a few things. Your physical, mental and spiritual health all have something to do with it. As well as your environment, habits, and routines. All of which interact together in some sort of way and result in how you respond to your life.
What you eat, drink, think, pray about matters. Who you are around, what you are doing, the time you wake up, and the words you ingest all matter. It is the close auditing of what you let in; that results in your mental state.
I know for me, if I miss a few core key “habits” on a certain day, I am simply not as effective. It is in this realization that not being on the quest for a high quality of life leads to settling for less. If you don’t do something to change, something else will change you.
What do you think?
Sincerely,
Skylar Lysaker
