Do you secretly want a perfect life?
Are you usually lost in daydreams where everything seems to work out and falls into place with the littlest effort? If you’re anything like me then you probably have and still do. Don’t worry, it will be our little secret.
So, how do these dreams usually play out – do they center around your health, wealth, family, relationships, or all of the above? Probably all.
While I wish I could encourage these daydreams, I need you to spend more time in the real world and your real life. The imperfect, trying-to-make-things work life.
That is the real deal and we only get one chance at it. I say these things to remind us of how easy it is to spend time on the impossibilities while leaving out the opportunities. We may believe we are helpless and can do nothing to change our circumstances and end up acting as victims of circumstance rather than victors.
Taking control means gaining the power or knowledge to guide and manage our lives. It is the distinguishing factor of one who chooses to live with purpose.
God did not create us just to live but to live more abundantly – John 10:10, understanding what we need to do and when to do it.
“Do what you can with all you have, wherever you are.” Theodore Roosevelt
Four Steps to Control Your Life
These four areas are critical in pursuit of a more intentional and meaningful life. I hope you find these useful.
1. Be Humble.
- Are you easily offended, with a prickly skin and heightened senses?
- Are you quick to correct others, to show why you’re better, prettier, healthier and all the other –iers?
- Do you find it hard to let things go? Quick to recount issues and conflicts?
- Do you love being right and willing to spend the whole day(or year) arguing your point?
- Do you always feel the need to be recognized, celebrated, and remembered?
- Are you more concerned with what people will say? Do you often do things to impress others?
- Are you afraid of failing or even telling others about your failures?
- Do you give credit where it’s due or like to hug the limelight?
That’s quite a list and for good reason, humility is an important ingredient to living a full life but also difficult, in practice. It is our ability to be free from pride and arrogance, two things’ we humans have in spades. It’s easier to be arrogant than it is to be humble. Arrogance can be subtle, without our knowledge or consent, which means we need to be intentional about walking in humility.
There is a popular saying that “your attitude is everything’. Our character has a huge impact on what we do and how we are perceived. Do you struggle with pride? Before you answer, take a few minutes to ask yourself some questions. You can answer the ones I stated above and a few others.
We need to be honest about this so we can work on it.
There is also false humility, which is where we pretend outwardly to be humble but are still puffed up inside. I talked about in this post. I started this piece with being humble since we need to get this right before we can do the other things effectively.
Humility is the gateway to sustainable growth and success, because it allows you to own up to your learning gaps and supports your willingness to be a lifelong student of life.
2. Be Decisive.
Taking control of our lives means realizing that the choice lies with us. It is up to us to do or not do. We are not only responsible for our lives but for our actions or inactions.
This means taking responsibility for our choices. We can choose to say ‘Yes’ or “no’ but not dilly dally between the two. Taking responsibility also means we own up to our mistakes rather than pass the buck.
Taking responsibility = learning from mistakes.
It takes a lot of courage to own up to things we’ve done or should have done but it is always the right thing to do.
We also need to learn to create healthy boundaries. This means learning to say no.
If you’re anything like me then you’ve struggled in this area. There are so many reasons why we find it difficult to say ‘no’ or easier to say ‘yes’. We say yes when we don’t want to disappoint the other person though it will usually mean taking on more than we can handle. At the root of this is often a desire to people please, to be seen in a good light and to belong to whatever social circle, connection or group that matters to us.
We may also suffer from what I call the “super-hero complex“, are you the daughter everyone relies on, the sister, colleague, friend who is everything to everyone? This is not sustainable and will only lead to disrespect and burnout. It’s okay to say no to the wrong things and yes to the things that matter.
“I encourage people to remember that “No” is a complete sentence”.
Gavin De Becker
3. Plan with Purpose
Have you ever wondered about the sort of things you want to do or accomplish? Have you ever considered the ‘p’ word – purpose? Hope so. Planning is all about making sense of who we are and who we want to be. It’s about connecting the dots from dreams to reality. It could be for the long term, short term, or medium term. All that matters is that there is some coherent structure to the way we choose to live our lives.
An important part of planning is that it is written down. It is not enough to think about it. Even if you have the best memory in the world, it will still fail you so write it down.
“Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; can’ts into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality. Don’t just think it–ink it.”
Michael Korda
Writing it down is also a way to process your thoughts and to prioritize.
If you want to plan but don’t know how to go about it, you could start by making a simple list. I call this the life plan list – start with the things you want to do and achieve (no need to add a specific time frame),
Then create another column where you write out what you would need to achieve the things in the first list, and finally set a time frame for these tasks, be realistic. You will probably realise that some of them will fall into the short, mid, and long-term horizons and that’s okay.
Don’t be in a hurry, it’s better to plan well and finish well. There are quite a few life planners out there, you can check out the Passion Planner, this is one of the most comprehensive planners out there, it works as a yearly planner (not dated) and also includes spaces for noting longer term plans.
4. Activate Your Plans
Taking control of our lives means that we don’t just sit and wait for things to happen but ‘act’! We need to take real steps to actualise our plans.
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Author
Change is an expected constant in our lives, and this means there may never be a better time to do the things we need to do. The stars will not align, and you may have to hold back for a long while if you’re waiting to have enough money, time, a husband, children, love, family and all the other things we use as excuses and reasons to stall.
Another setback is procrastination, it is usually our way of avoiding the very things we should be doing.
Are you watching yet another episode of Friends rather than write? Or maybe you’re in another Instagram rabbit hole where a 10-minute “innocent” browse turns to hours devouring pictures of your friends and all those lovely people you admire?
Don’t worry you’re not alone. While it’s quite normal to procrastinate, it still hampers our progress. You can set timelines that make room for work and play. You know yourself best, you can use your planner to set these timelines.
A more ominous problem is self-sabotage, the elder and more dangerous sibling to procrastination.
Self-sabotage is usually a deliberate act to destroy or hamper our growth. It may mean not attending an interview you had spent months praying for, eating even more junk than usual when you’re trying to lose weight, signing up for paid online class but never attending. There are so many ways in which we work against our dreams and goals. I hope to write more on this subject as I’ve seen how detrimental it is to our progress.
A quick way to overcome this issue is to break your tasks down and do them bit by bit. It will certainly add up in no time and you can build momentum this way as self-sabotage is often fueled by fear – fear of not being good enough, of success and of change.
Never forget to stay grounded
While the above steps are integral to living a more intentional and purposeful life, they are nothing and will be useless without some sense of the divine. As a Christian, I have learnt to live a life that is rooted in my relationship with God. This constantly helps me refine my decisions and actions to ensure continuous alignment with my beliefs.
It is necessary that we learn to take control of our lives especially as our world leans deeper into divisions, intolerance, and bias. People will look for reasons to distinguish themselves from others and where we don’t know or understand our selves and the things that matter to us, we may find that we follow the pack, doing what the majority are doing or feeling the pressure to conform.
Whatever you do, I hope you realise that the power to live an unforgettable life lies with you.
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