Master or Mistress: Keepers of Our Personal Success
What prevents you from attaining your personal and career goals? Lifestyle habits, you might say, or maybe other people, or the economy? We all can easily come up with some reason/s, and certainly there can be extenuating situations, why we sometimes fail to succeed. In fact, failure is a natural occurrence, statistically speaking. Considering the “natural distribution” of successes and failures, without intervention of any kind, there should be about equal odds at both. Since failure is usually not an acceptable concept, what can we do to increase our chances of succeeding at our goals?
Let’s think about personal goals. For most of us these include things like improving our financial status, health, relationships, and lifestyles. Mathematically, every one of these has about an equal chance of getting better or worse if we do nothing at all. The problem is, there are many variables working on our goals that we may not be aware of which affect those odds. If you are unemployed and do nothing to find a job, with the economy the way it is, the odds are stacked against you that a job will come to you without you spending any energy looking for one. Likewise, if your relationships are unsatisfactory and you do nothing to ameliorate them, the people in those relationships have their own issues and may decide to invest their energies in ways that may not be compatible with your needs and aspirations, resulting in failure in this area.
When it comes to taking care of ourselves, why do so many of us pick and choose which proactive health habits to incorporate into our daily lives? With so much information available today at our fingertips, many times we ignore those aspects of prevention which are not compatible with those very habits which stand in the way of being healthy. The knowledge that eating too many sweets interferes with weight loss, normal blood sugar, and predisposes us to diabetes isn’t enough to control those sugar cravings, so we give into them and then say we can’t lose weight or manage our metabolism. Likewise with smoking; just about everyone who has a pulse knows that smoking is a major health risk factor. Yet I see people who have serious medical problems, a history of cancer, COPD, compromised immune systems, and on dozens of medications, lighting up on a regular basis. They then complain about not feeling well, continuing to spiral downward into more diseased states. In the meantime, their insurance companies continue to pay for more expensive treatments, hospital stays and medications, driving up health care costs.
So what’s the disconnect between knowledge and behavior? I think it’s kind of like a guy who has a mistress (or woman who has a secret lover): they each know they’re married and shouldn’t be spending time and money on someone other than their spouse, but still keep that relationship despite the stress it causes in their lives. The element of emotional discordance seems to be a necessity for some people to feel alive. They fear feeling good about themselves for doing what they’re supposed to do, in order to flourish.
So be honest with yourself. If there is a certain part of your life you really want to succeed at, ask yourself if you’ve removed the impediments you are in control of. If you are having trouble finding a rewarding job where you live even though you are hard-working and qualified, if you refuse to move to an area where you could find a job, chances are you will fail at finding employment in your present location. If you’re doing everything “right” to lose weight but don’t exercise, you will probably fail to achieve your weight goals. Who really is the mistress or master of your life?
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About Dr. Virginia
As a licensed Psychologist practicing Cognitive therapy, I work with my clients to help them identify the personal issues that are preventing them from achieving a more satisfying and well-adjusted life.
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