If You Want Things to Be Better, MAKE them Better!

In difficult times - as many of us are facing these days - we often find ourselves wishing that things were somehow better.

Do you feel lucky?

Perhaps we hope for some extraordinary stroke of luck, or to suddenly have superhuman abilities, or maybe to have a moment of exceptional clarity.

Whatever the case may be, we're typically wishing for something external to take control of the situation and resolve it to our benefit. In essence, we're being passive bystanders in our own lives.

Invariably, that external resolution doesn't actually happen, very often. And so, we end up just sitting there, feeling sad and hopeless because "nothing happened."

In psychology, there is a state of being known as "learned helplessness" which basically refers to the idea we get that we have no control over a situation and its outcome. In other words, there's an intangible "it" in charge of everything... while we are helpless.

Usually, having this sort of feeling is the result of having spent a substantial part of your life feeling unseen and unheard. If it was something that happened in childhood, you might have had parents who ignored or didn't want to hear what your opinions were. And so it became meaningless to have an opinion.

Regardless of how learned helplessness arose in your life, the way forward is to take a step and actually be an active agent in your own life. That means that if you want things to be better you have to make them better!

Many people insist that learned helplessness does not play a role in their lives. But when you listen to them talk about what's going on around them, their language suggests that whenever something is not turning out the way they were hoping they are, in fact, in a state of helplessness.

Do you ever blame an unfortunate outcome on pretty much everything except the fact that maybe you made a bad decision?

Have you ever chosen to not do something because you are convinced that some greater force or something that wasn't your own initiative would "make it" fail?

Those are subtler examples of learned helplessness.

Actually making things better can be quite a challenge, because for most people it involves stepping out of their comfort zone.

Like it or not - even though it is not a particularly healthy place to be - aforementioned learned helplessness is actually a comfort zone for many people. When we sit in a place emotionally where we believe that life is something that happens TO us, it's comfortable even though it may be painful to experience the lesson perfect results. It's comfortable because we don't have to be accountable for our own decisions, we can just "blame life" when something goes wrong.

However, it's not the path to truly make your life better!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Do you ever blame life or external circumstances for how things are turning out? Or are you an active participant in your own life? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2023.10.25 22:03 PDT
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