Focus on This When Change Is Out Of Your Control

Change equals difference. That's a basic definition, but it's truthfully what the change is. Something is different than it was before. This could be your job, a relationship, mother nature, or anything else. Where change is concerned, you come to grips with it before you've lived very long on this planet.

 

Almost all change is out of your control.

 

Even the most obsessively compulsive person who strives every minute of every day for control is taunted by this fact. Try as you may, your world will largely spin in any direction it wants. It doesn't stop and ask you what reality you'd like to experience.

 

You can try and influence it, and you might be successful in some ways. For instance, you can work really hard to get promoted. You go out of your way to find out what your boss needs from you, and then you make sure that happens. You outwork your coworkers, take extra courses that help you move up the corporate ladder, and nail a big promotion.

 

While patting yourself on the back for your hard work and how it paid off, remember one thing ... your boss or someone above him still had the final say in whether you got promoted or not.

 

That's pretty humbling when you think about it.

 

Take a look at any area of your life. You'll see that you don't always have as much influence as you previously thought you did. The best you can do is work on yourself, your relationships, and your environment to create a favorable reality.

 

Then when life steps in and throws some negative change in your face, remember to ask yourself this question.

 

"What Can I Control?"

 

Imagine that you are going for a walk. It's a beautiful day. The world has treated you to a spectacular experience with sunny skies, birds chirping, and stress-relieving nature all around you.

 

Then immediately in your pathway, a brick wall appears out of nowhere. It wasn't there, and then it was there. It's only a few feet wide, so you can easily walk around it. Instead, you repeatedly try to walk through it.

 

You can't control that this change has happened. What you can control is your response to it. Claim your sphere of control. Do what you can do, which is to move around the wall and continue your enjoyable walk.

 

Life will give you a lot of change you'd rather avoid. When this happens, don't waste a second of your time trying to influence something you have no control over. Determine what you can influence and what you can't. Then take action to turn something negative into the best possible outcome.

 

Focus on what you can control when you experience negative change. Trying to influence things that are blind to you is pointless. It wastes your time, cranks up your frustration, leads to anxiety and stress, and all of that can be avoided. You take away the power of negative change when you use your sphere of control to put it behind you as quickly as possible.

 

Never Look at a Failure As Final

Do you know anyone who seems to be bulletproof? You know, that friend of yours that takes failures in stride and is always smiling and moving forward in life. How do they do it? You know they're not immune to setbacks or hardship. They just seem to be able to bounce back quickly. Life's inevitable difficulties don't keep them from living the life they desire.

 

By the way, that person can be you. Mental resilience is something that can be developed. It's not a character trait you have to be born with. Every time you suffer some type of loss or failure, you have an opportunity to respond with resilience and emotional control.

 

If that seems impossible for you sometimes, here's what you need to start doing. Never look at a failure as the final result. Don't let some hardship or difficulty be the final chapter in your story. Or, as famous author F. Scott Fitzgerald said ...

 

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat."

 

That is such a powerful reminder that your outlook is everything. The person with resilience chooses a positive outlook. They understand that negative things are going to happen in their life. Yet they don't allow that to be the end of their journey.

 

They don't embrace any single failure or loss as the final declaration of who they are.

 

Just Take One More Step

 

Resilience means persisting. You keep going. You push forward and see life's difficulties as nothing more than challenges. You can either become stronger and more capable or allow a defeat or failure to be a statement of who you are.

 

This can seem like simple advice, but the truth is, sometimes, the hardship we encounter in life can be truly debilitating. We simply don't see a way out. The worst of possible things has happened, and there's simply no way that we see any good coming from this.

 

When this happens, as it inevitably will in life, just take one step forward.

 

Don't worry about some big end result. You may be in a terrible situation. If you are, just make one positive movement. 

 

Have one positive thought. Move in the direction of a positive outcome. Even if it's miles away, don't worry about that end result. Just take the first step that moves you a little bit away from the difficulty you encountered.

 

Never let any single defeat be your final defeat. The instant you decide to relentlessly push forward, you show the world and yourself that you are a resilient human being. You won't be kept down for long because your unbreakable mental resolve won't allow you to be defined by defeat.