Are You the Problem In Your Life?
Recognizing I was the problem in my life was key to helping me begin to move from burnt out, stressed out, anxious, and overwhelmed, to living my best life over a decade ago. And while recognizing the role you play in keeping yourself stuck in patterns you don’t actually want to be in can be painful, it is also incredibly liberating.
Approaching the process with non-judgmental awareness
A big part of my journey to living my best life has been to get really honest with myself and see things I don’t necessarily want to see.
There are two ways to respond when you identify or recognize something about yourself you don’t particularly like.
The first is to allow your critical inner voice to speak up. If you go this route, you’ll find your mind spinning around not only what you’ve identified in yourself, but also the frustration, shame, guilt, and/or embarrassment, that it even exists for you to identify. Usually this leads to us trying to bury it all into a deep dark mental black hole and pretend it doesn’t exist.
The other option is to acknowledge it without judgment. To see yourself through compassionate eyes, recognizing we are all human having a human experience. Which by it’s nature is perfectly imperfect – filled with mistakes, struggles, and opportunities to learn and grow. When you approach this process from this place of non-judgmental awareness, you’re able to recognize what you’re ready to release and make changes to move you closer to who you want to be and the life you want to live.
Cultivating this type of awareness
From those two definitions, I bet you can guess which one I’d recommend you adopt!
When you work to quiet your inner critic and instead approach what you discover about yourself with compassion, you’re able to actually take action to get out of your own way and stop being the problem in your life.
In yoga, we refer to this type of self-discovery through the lens of acknowledgment without judgment as the witness consciousness. You’re simply witnessing what plays out in your mind without attaching to the thoughts and stories as they roll through. Here are a couple of suggestions to help you begin to cultivate this technique.
Meditation or mindfulness
Begin a meditation or mindfulness practice if you don’t already have one. If you do have one, practice simply watching the thoughts move across your mind like clouds moving through the sky. Allow them to simply be without expanding the story.
In improv, you’re taught to respond to people with “yes, and” – because it helps move the story along. In day-to-day life, you might also be used to experiencing “yes, but” – which is sort of like moving the story in reverse – explaining why you’ve already ruled something out as a possibility. Instead of “yes, and” or “yes, but”, try to meet your thoughts with a simple “ok”.
When you practice this technique on thoughts that arise during meditation like – what to make for dinner, or how to organize your day, it allows you to gain experience for when you approach something a little more emotionally charged.
If you’re not sure how to get started with this, I’ve created a guided meditation designed to help you begin to cultivate this state of witness consciousness. It’s the bonus for this week’s episode, and you can download it using the form below.
Recognizing the imperfection all around you
In the digital world we live in, it can be easy to miss the messy parts of other people’s lives when you only see what they deem to be Instagram worthy.
In a 2019 systematic literature review published in the journal Media Psychology on studies conducted on social comparison and self-esteem, researchers concluded that social media use “often triggers upward social comparisons, leading to declines in self-esteem”.
When we see all the good parts of other people’s lives, we begin to forget that everyone else has their good moments AND their bad moments – just like we do. Which in turn, makes us feel even worse when we do experience some of those bad moments or discover something about ourselves we don’t particularly like.
Take some time to recognize the world is filled with imperfection – and that’s not a bad thing. Think about a four-leaf clover – many people regard them as good luck, but it’s simply an imperfect three-leaf clover.
As you work on self-discovery, if you notice your inner critic chime in, gently remind it that imperfection is an opportunity to learn and grow – not something to feel shame or guilt about.
If you’re feeling stuck or stagnant
Ok having said all that, let’s get into answering the question – how do you know if you’re the problem in your life.
If you’re feeling stuck or stagnant, this is a good sign you’re the problem in your life. When you feel stuck it usually means you’ve chosen to accept the status quo. To get out of a stuck or stagnant place, you need to take action.
Think of it like stepping in mud – if you just leave your foot in the mud, eventually it will stop raining. And the sun will come out. The mud will begin to dry, but instead of getting unstuck, your shoe is now encased in hard clay which shrank and tightened up around you as it dried. The only way to get unstuck is to physically pull your foot free. I suppose you could wait around for a car to come driving through the area and hit you – therefore knocking you free of the mud, but that comes with some pretty nasty consequences.
The same thing applies in life – if we wait for circumstances to propel us out of a place where we’re stuck, chances are it isn’t going to be pretty. You instead need to take action to break out of that place you’re stuck in.
You keep experiencing the same story different details.
Do you keep experiencing the same story with different details?
For many years, I’d work at a job for a few years, get overwhelmed and burnt out, and leave. Only to repeat the pattern again. For a long time I thought it was the jobs I was choosing. They required more than any one person could give. In fact, often when I left these jobs I was replaced with more than one person.
Here’s what I was missing – the job responsibilities when I left were greatly expanded from what they were when I was hired. As a perfectionist and a people-pleaser, I would take on more and more responsibility trying to make sure everything was done just right. I struggled to say no whenever anyone asked for help or needed me to take on an extra project. And as a result, my job duties ballooned the longer I worked somewhere.
The problem wasn’t really the people I worked with, or for, it was me. It was my poor boundaries that saw me say yes to everything. It was my desire to have control and make everything perfect. And it was my inability to speak up when I was overwhelmed BEFORE I got burnt out.
Where are you the common denominator
Take a moment and think about a problem in your life. Can you think of ways it’s played out before in your life – maybe with different details, but a similar story line? If you keep experiencing the same story with different details, it’s a good sign you might be the problem in your life.
That you are creating the conditions in which you allow or even welcome in this problem or challenge. Where you set yourself up for struggle over and over again.
The good news is this happens because we have an opportunity to learn something about ourselves, and we just haven’t figured it out yet. Once we figure out the lesson we need to learn and begin to address it, we break the cycle and these problems and challenges stop showing up.
In the story of your life, you’re always the tragic heroine.
In the story of your life, are you always the tragic heroine? Do things just keep happening to you? And you feel like the world is just a great big struggle? Maybe you find yourself thinking along the lines of “of course things always work out for them, but they just don’t work out for me”.
I remember complaining to my therapist once when I was married to my first husband about how he treated me – and she looked at me and said “you must be getting something out of it or you wouldn’t still be with him”. At the time I had no idea what she was talking about. But now I know – I felt good being the martyr. When I sacrificed my needs to take care of others, I felt noble and worthy.
But it also meant I didn’t own my role in any of the unhealthy dynamics in my personal relationships – either romantic or platonic. I simply felt put upon by the world.
If you find yourself falling into the thought patterns and behaviors of a victim or martyr, this is another good sign you’re the problem in your life.
Defining the role of the victim
Sometimes stuff happens in our lives that we’d never wish on our worst enemy. When I talk about the victim here, I’m not talking about that stuff – things like having your car stolen or being violently attacked.
PsychCentral defines the victim mentality as “when a person feels like a victim across situations, even when the evidence suggests otherwise. They may feel they have no control over what happens to them. “ And they go on to add “It can involve feeling like the world is out to get you or having difficulty taking personal responsibility for what happens in your life.“
I once knew a woman who was incredibly angry with her parents for dying. She was an only child and although she had a husband and two children, she felt as though her parents had “left her all alone”. Her anger came from this mental state of occupying the role of victim – she believed they had abandoned her by going ahead and dying. (An important note – they both died of natural causes.) In her story, their death was an example of the world being out to get her.
Taking responsibility for your life
If you find yourself slipping into this role, again, you’re being invited to learn a lesson. In the case of the women who was angry with her parents, a great lesson would be to learn empathy, to recognize that death might represent the end to suffering for someone who has been ill for a long time.
Perhaps, as in my case, the lesson is learning to cultivate an intrinsic sense of worthiness, not one dependent on relational transactions with others.
It’s often humbling to recognize the role we play in these struggles and challenges we face in our lives. It’s important to begin identifying where our thoughts, actions, stories, and beliefs are actually fueling these challenges instead of helping to solve or resolve them. AND, in recognizing the role we play, we get the opportunity to make a change, which in turn allows us to actually solve these struggles and challenges.
You’re not a co-creator of your life
There was a time in my life when I was waiting for a head hunter to call and offer me a dream job. I knew I was working so hard at the job I currently had, and I believed a head hunter would somehow hear through the grapevine how awesome I was and offer me some amazing opportunity. BUT, I had no idea what that amazing opportunity was. And I didn’t share this desire with anyone so they would even know to share how awesome I was with a headhunter.
I wasn’t actually working to co-create my life, I was simply sitting back and hoping it would magically come to me.
If you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a lot about manifestation and the law of attraction. And I do believe both of those things are really important – but something we sometimes miss is that you need to take conscious action to actually manifest and attract what you want into your life! You can’t simply think happy thoughts and wake up tomorrow with your dream car in the driveway.
So if you’re expecting a perfect life to manifest but you’re not taking any actions to clarify what that life looks like and begin to take action steps to move toward it, that’s another good indicator you might be the problem in your life.
What does co-creation look like?
Co-creation is the process of setting goals and taking action to move your life toward them. I could fill several podcasts with this topic, but here are a few important things I want to note on this process.
First, this is co-creation – you are in a dance with the world around you. It’s less like you’re in a sandbox in a room inside building your dream castle, and more like you’re on a busy, and windy, beach building your dream castle while navigating everything going on around you. Depending on your beliefs, you might view you co-creator as god, the universe, and/or the realities of this physical and temporal world.
Next, you can manifest feelings and emotions as well as things. Often, we try to manifest a specific thing – a specific car, house, partner, job, etc. But I prefer to focus on the emotion or feeling behind that thing I’m trying to manifest. For instance – a new car might make me feel safe when I’m driving on the highway – so I focus on manifesting safety. A new car isn’t the only route and focusing on the feeling allows you to be open to the job offer that allows you to work from home and eliminates the hour long highway commute you were doing every day.
Finally, taking responsibility is key here. You need to actively set a goal and take action to move toward it. The more clarity you have here, the less you’ll find yourself standing in your own way! If you’re struggling with this part of the process, check out last week’s episode where we covered how to know where to put your time and energy!
What to do if you think you’re the problem in your life
If you think you’re the problem in your life, simply listening reading this post is a great first step. It’s bringing conscious awareness to something which to this point has likely been festering below the surface.
If one of these ways of being the problem in your life resonated strongly with you, begin to learn more about it. Journal, meditate on it, read books, listen to podcasts, talk to friends – just get curious. Learn more about yourself, learn more about alternative ways of showing up, and use all of that to begin to get out of your own way!
This level of self-discovery and introspection can feel like a lot. If you’d like additional support I’d love to help – schedule a Personal Roadmap Discovery Call with me. Additionally, I have a printable Journal for Self-Discovery which offers 90 prompts to help you explore stories, beliefs, and though pattern which might be preventing you from living your best life.
Finally, if you decide to embark on this journey without the support of a coach or other trained professional who can guide you through the process, please make sure you offer yourself time to process and integrate, this is the work of a lifetime, not a weekend.
And remember – living your best life isn’t about changing your life – it’s about changing the way you show up for your life!
Show Notes
Mentioned in this Episode
Get a framework for deciding where to put your time and energy.
Purchase the printable Journal for Self-Discovery
Schedule a Personal Roadmap Discovery Session.
Get on the VIP list to have all podcast worksheets delivered to your inbox on Tuesday mornings.
Submit your question to be featured on a future episode.
