Normal vs Extraordinary

It doesn’t matter what circumstances you woke up to this morning. You have the opportunity to create something different than you experienced yesterday, if that is what you choose. Unfortunately most of us don’t recognize that fact. We feel stuck. We’ve accepted that our lives are what they are and we need to suck it up and just learn to deal with it.

Nothing could be further from the truth and I’ll share why. First, can we agree that whatever circumstances we become accustomed to become our normal? We continue to do the same things until they are such an ingrained habit, we don’t give them much thought. We become complacent and comfortable and live inside our little box where we feel safe and protected. Thus we continue to react in the same manner and achieve the same results.

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you broke the chain of habitual thinking and did something different? Of course you have. We daydream about making different choices and what would result from those choices all the time. Most of the time we talk ourselves out of it, whatever it is, because we think it would be irresponsible to do anything that isn’t consistent with how we’ve been living.

If we could accept that we are responsible for all of the circumstances in our lives, would it influence our decisions? I think it would. I find it amusing that it usually takes a big slap upside the head from the universe to get us to recognize that our habitual thinking and behaviors aren’t going to produce something different than we’ve already gotten. This happened to me twice within four years. One of those circumstances resulted in my divorce which I’ve written about in prior blogs so I won’t repeat it here.

The second situation involved my job. I’d been writing more and more in my spare time and talked about writing a book with my family. However I felt it would be downright ridiculous and irresponsible to leave my job so I could spend more time writing. I had deeply held believes about what I was responsible for but there were gaps in my thinking so I never took it all the way to being 100% responsible for my results. That said, I felt stuck. There was something I wanted to do however I believed that I needed my job to survive. Much of this had to do with my beliefs about how to make money. In walks the universe with a giant sense of humor. The company I worked for announced a change in the geographic location I would be responsible for and my windshield time was going to triple. I saw this as the universe forcing me to step out of my comfort and make a new choice.

When we step away from our normal way of thinking and doing things, the possibility of creating something extraordinary becomes a reality. It may not be world changing however any shift outside our normal will result in dramatic changes in our lives. That can and does feel extraordinary to us. Once we are able to examine our beliefs, make a change in our thinking and take action, something interesting happens. We begin to look at other beliefs and habits. That increase in awareness is not something we can ignore and that comfortable box we’ve been living in becomes uncomfortably small. All it takes is a change in one area to get the ball rolling toward a fuller, more satisfying life.

It’s Your Life….Own It! shares exercises to assist you, should you decide you desire changes in your life. The book and my other work is available on my website