Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration reading from Chapter 10 of Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop. The title of this chapter is “Life.”
Today’s chapter continues the explanation of the three saboteurs, with the third being life. There are lots of nuggets today, some of which we will separate into an action plan. Let’s dive in:
- The final saboteur is often the heaviest of them all. This is the conclusion you’ve made about life itself. How do you feel about life?
- What stirs for you when you take a look at where you’re at, including all of the family and relationship stuff, what’s going on with your work, your neighborhood, your town. Take it out even further to social issues and political concerns you have, the problems and tragedies currently facing the country and the world.
- But we almost have to tell ourselves the upbeat, positive story that life is this way or that to distract us from what we really believe to be true.
- Deep down in your subconscious, there resides a life conclusion: “Life is hard.” “Life is complicated.” “Life is a struggle.” “Life is too much.”
- Like the rest of your conclusions, it’s never good news!
- In fact, while what you think about yourself and others might upset you, what you think about life is what really puts the lid on everything.
- Without your even realizing it, your conclusion about life shapes and influences the everyday paths you take and burdens you to live with the consequence.
- If you’ve concluded that “life is a struggle,” you’re going to work hard to overcome that struggle with all the positivity or hard work or logical thinking that you can muster, but you’ll inadvertently be making sure it stays one too. You’ll pass up or write off opportunities and openings for change that seem too easy or too complex, or you’ll sabotage yourself when you’re seemingly winning.
- Rather than avoid the struggle, you literally keep yourself in it. You make the same mistakes again and again, hit the same pitfalls over and over.
- Many of our problems in life could be solved fairly simply, but we somehow can’t, don’t, or won’t deal with them. You need to look past the litany of ready-to-hand explanations here.
- It’s what you have concluded about life that has you stuck in a certain place.
- What you’re dealing with internally often doesn’t match up to what is going on externally.
Here’s the action plan for you today:
If you want to eventually get to exist beyond your own conclusion about life, you’re going to have to figure out what it is first. And now is the perfect time to do so.
This can be tough because these life conclusions are often the least obvious. They’re so pervasive, they’re so soaked into every part of our lives, that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what they are.
It seems to me the most important thing to uncover is the nature of this conclusion rather than specifically what it is. There’s not much difference between “Life is hard” and “Life is a struggle.” They both would have a similar effect on how one interacts with life.
When you’re pressed in life, when you’re struggling every day or every week, one or all of your conclusions will be in your face.
What is it you say to yourself about life when it’s not going your way?
When you’re having a hard time is when you’re most wrapped up in your conclusions about one area . . . or sometimes all.
When you’re up to your throat in it, these conclusions wash over you when you’re losing or failing or rejected or just not making it.
They kick in when it’s getting “too good” or too uncertain or getting you into an area of life that would require some significant reinvention. And so . . . you return to base. To the familiar. You sabotage and turn back.
Give particular attention to those times when you’re stressed out or discouraged. What are the familiar, patterned thoughts that pop into your head during those times?
If you’re not feeling that way now, think back to the last time it happened, the last time when you experienced being beat down or pressed. Perhaps you can think back to a time in your past, like your childhood, when you went through struggle, hardship, or danger, and that became the overarching or most influential experience of your young life. What did you conclude? Maybe your parents divorced, or your mom died, or you were held back a grade, or you never made the soccer team, and suddenly your idea of what life is started to change.
Your childhood was peppered with the kinds of events that inadvertently steered your younger self toward a life that has some kind of flavor to it, some kind of meaning that you happened upon and bled into the deepest crevices of that magic little sponge, to be used for future guidance. What is life to you? Perhaps it’s “confusing” or “dangerous” or “too much” or “pointless.”
Finally, look at the things you want in life but that you either don’t pursue or always seem to fall short of.
For instance, what’s your current dream life? Moving to Bali or Kansas or Dublin? Is it about being thinner or taller or richer? Does it include a house or a certain car or a certain body shape? No matter what it is, it’s important for you to take note that even your dreams are lived within a certain range.
They’re certainly not limitless. Where is your starting point? What problem does that “dream life” solve that’s at the low end of the range you exist in?
Don’t settle for the surface-level explanations and excuses you’ve come up with. Dig deeper.
That’s where you’ll find the conclusions you’ve made, the limitations you’ve placed on yourself. And you can do this for everything from your income to your relationships to your health to your hobbies to the age you want to retire.
These conclusions have bled into every element of your life, influencing both the paths you take and the paths you don’t. It’s important for you to take some stock here, to get in touch with your innermost fears and concerns. To allow yourself to slip down into the depths of your own struggle. Not to indulge it or embellish it, but to witness it. To see it do its thing. I want you to become the observer rather than the indulger. The eyewitness rather than the victim. Step way back from the Days of Our Lives drama of your sabotage and do some thinking. Piece this little mystery together for yourself.
Listen, you have made a damning conclusion about life. It’s right in front of your face. This doesn’t need to be solved but rather spoken into existence. It needs to rise from the muddled background of your thoughts, up through your consciousness, and out of your mouth. You need to say it out loud.
Life is . . .
Go grab that pen or pencil.
LIFE CONCLUSION—“LIFE IS _______________________.”
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Have you ever felt like you’re so close to success that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, only to have that success slip between your fingers? What if that was supposed to go that way because that particular success would have been a threat to what you have fundamentally concluded?
There’s a glass ceiling that you can’t see, that sends you right back down to earth the moment you try to surpass it. And when you bump your head on that ceiling and your ass hits the floor, you’ve once again proven your conclusion about life.
