So many of our behaviours are learnt. And sometimes we don’t even realise this. To a large extent we function on automatic without being truly conscious about what we are doing or what we are feeling.
Ever felt a sense of helplessness about a situation in which you found yourself? Ever felt resentful about doing something or being somewhere? We often feel that we don’t have a choice about a situation or about a task that needs to be done. And this can be at work, at home or in a social environment. We feel that we simply have to do whatever it is. Some people may even think it is about obligation or about meeting a commitment that was made.
Well, I see this quite differently and would like to share this with you. I think that many of us lose control over our lives through learned helplessness. This learned helplessness is a result of passively accepting situations during our formative and childhood years when we felt we were unable to change them. And now as adults we are caught in this spiral of having to do whatever it is.
And no. It is not always as easy as just not doing whatever it is. But it is as simple as reconsidering how we view the situation or task that we don’t really want to do. It is when we feel that we don’t have a choice that we feel disempowered about our own life. And this is the negative feeling that pervades our thoughts and erodes our power.
What we need to grasp is that we always a choice. Sometimes we don’t have a choice about doing a particular task or being at a specific place but we do have a choice as to how we allow ourselves to feel about it. We need to work at reprogramming our thought process so instead of saying “I have to do this”, we need to say “I choose to do this”. By rephrasing our thoughts, we start to understand that we do have a choice, even if that choice is only about deciding that we choose to do something rather than have to do it.