AGENTS OF  CHANGE

Work towards creating the impact you desire

BY Archana Law

Do you make life happen or is life simply happening to you? “The great paradox of our time is that many of us are busy and bored at the same time. While running from one event to the next, we wonder in our innermost selves if anything is really happening,” says Dutch priest and writer Henri Nouwen.

How many times do you hear people (yourself included) talk about how busy they are every second of the day? But do we stop along the way to think truly about what it is we’re actually doing with the precious seconds, minutes and hours in our lives?

Are we working towards a life that’s full of activities or one that’s full of meaning? Think about it.

At one point or another, all of us tire of the way we have been living and want to make changes for the better. But while a complete overhaul may seem like the most logical answer, there are more subtle changes that we can make to create the life we want.

Though there’s no such thing as a ‘perfect life,’ there are small ways to help improve your life every single day. Here are a few pointers…

TAKE OWNERSHIP The principle behind creating something is to accept end-to-end responsibility. For many people, everything is someone else’s fault.

Every problem can be explained away with reasons as to why they can’t impact the situation or its outcome. Failures have scapegoats so that we can avoid taking responsibility for our actions and claim the results are never a result of the choices we made.

YOUR RESPONSES Taking charge of ourselves involves putting to rest some prevailing myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by our ability to solve complex problems: to read, write and compute at certain levels; and resolve abstract equations quickly. What’s more, life’s struggles are pretty much the same for all of us – disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human.

Similarly, making money, growing old, getting sick, and being a victim of natural disasters and accidents are problems that confront all human beings. But some people are able to make it through, and avoid immobilising dejection and unhappiness; others collapse and become inert or suffer a nervous breakdown.

YOUR EMOTIONS You’ve probably grown up believing that you can’t control your emotions, and that anger, fear and hate, as well as love, ecstasy and joy, are things that happen to you. Feelings are not simply emotions that happen to you; they’re reactions you choose to have.

If you’re in charge of your emotions, you don’t have to choose self-defeating reactions. Once we learn that we can feel what we choose to feel, we’ll be on the road to ‘intelligence,’ which is a new path where a given emotion is a choice rather than a condition of life!

YOUR THOUGHTS If you can control your thoughts and the feelings that result from them, then you are capable of controlling your feelings. And you control your feelings by working on the thoughts that precede them.

Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy; but that’s not right because you can make yourself unhappy due to the thoughts you have about people or events in your life.

OWN YOUR ‘WHY?’ Fulfilment is a right, not a privilege! All of us are entitled to feel fulfilled by the work we do, wake up feeling inspired to go to work, feel safe when we’re in the workplace and return home with a sense that we have contributed to something greater than ourselves.

The goal is not to focus on what’s standing in your way but take steps that will have a positive and lasting effect on everyone around you. At its core, our purpose springs from our identity: the essence of who we are instead of a list of educational qualifications, experience and skills that we’ve gathered through life.

Most importantly, taking responsibility for your life is to acknowledge that it is your responsibility. No one can live your life for you – you are in charge. Each event is the result of choices you made and continue to make.

If you want to travel, it shouldn’t be your job, spouse, cost or time that holds you back. You should decide to go ahead for your own reasons. If you want to be a certain weight, you must eat and exercise like someone who wants to weigh what you’d like to weigh… no matter what. In case you want a promotion at work, you must act, look, think and practise what successful professionals display in that role.

We all want to find meaning in our lives. If you want to change the world, you should start with one person – and that’s you!

In the words of Edwin Osgood Grover: “I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.’’