How to be well — Step 1

Realize that you are responsible for what and where you are

This is a tricky one but the only one that will make you start.

Your whole life you have been guided and influenced by people. By your friends, your family, your entourage, your heroes and villains, and especially, your parents.

You are who you are due to a convergence of all these people's opinions and influences.

Your values are a consequence of their values.

But not only that. And this is very important to have in mind.

You decided how to integrate those values!

You might not have had full control over what values you integrated and what values you have not. But you did decide how to integrate them. You were the one that decided a behavior or an action or a belief is good or not.

When you saw your father do something, you decided whether it is good or not. When you saw your mother believe something you decided if that belief is good or not.

Your view on the world is influenced by others but you are the final filter that says what to do with the influence.

What does this mean?

Only you can change yourself!

You are the one at the wheel and you are the one that steers. If you want to go somewhere you decide to go there. You steer and you just head there. The road might be bumpy, and you might want to go back because the previous way was easier and more familiar, but you know that in the end, you will find a better life and a better self.

You are the master of yourself!

You decide what happens to you!

You might have not known that before. But now you know. Now it’s the time to take control.

You might say to yourself stuff like:

• It is not my fault I am overweight! I work at a sitting desk all day. Or I don’t have time to work out or to move.
• It is not my fault I have a drinking problem! Life is hard. I need a way out of it. All my friends do it. I cannot just stay in the house, and when I go out I have to drink.
• It is not my fault I am unhappy with my job! I cannot risk changing it. What if nobody wants me? What if I cannot deal with the new job? The industry is not ok for me to change now.

And you are right. All these impediments are true! Working all day at the desk makes it hard to exercise! Social drinking makes it hard to stop drinking! Changing jobs puts big pressure on yourself! YES!

But they are not stopping you! They are making change difficult, yes, but not IMPOSSIBLE!

We will get into some clear steps on how to change your mindset on impediments and how to overcome them.

Until then, it is important to remember one last thing

It is not your fault!

The negation of “It is not my fault I am …”, in our case, is “I will stop being …”!

Stuff happened in life that got you here. People, actions, situations, decisions.

You did what you could with the tools you had!

It was hard to do it, to decide or to say differently! And it is ok if you did not!

You might ask yourself

What is the end result?

What you will do in these sessions is to change your default programing and your mindsets.

You want to change a bad, or “realistic”, view of the world into a good view of the world.

You want to completely remove “I have to” from your vocabulary and replace it with “I want to” for any situation.

You want to change from viewing problems outside into viewing solutions within.

You want to learn to be present, look within and understand yourself.

You want to accept yourself and the world as it is and respect yourself and it.

You will do that by reprogramming your mind and your subconscious. This can be done only by changing your patterns through exercises and repetitiveness.

That is why I will end every such article with an exercise. To ensure success you will follow the exercises!

Exercise no. 1

Your first exercise is to be conscious of your words. I want you to count every time you say words like:

• I have to
• I cannot
• I need to
• It’s impossible for me
• It happed to me

Expressions that state your disapproval of the situation you are in outside of your power.

I want you to count them with a counter. You could use a hardware counter like this one:

Not an affiliate link, btw!

Or counter apps on your phone that have counter widgets.

Like this one on Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.cliff.strichliste

or for IOS

Or any other application that you like! It is important to count because this way you will spend energy and it will make you feel more invested in the process.

If counting doesn’t work for you just be conscious and tell your self “Another one”.

See you next step. Until then I will leave you with a nice quote from Carl Jung

I am not what happened to me! I am what I chose to become!

Carl Jung

Thank you very much and stay tuned for the next step next week.

Until then good luck with the exercise.