Cause or Effect

We often see people spinning their wheels when tackling changes they want in their life. Are they weak willed, have no stamina to persevere, or can't bite the bullet and get on with it? I don't think that is the primary reason for not making the change. The main reason is that people confuse cause and effect and usually spend a lot of time dealing with effects.
We need to get more practice in designing our life rather just accepting it. We need better questions to ask ourselves to get at the cause and create effective change. Questions like:

1. What are the values that are controlling me?
2. How do I know when my values are being met?
3. What are my rules foe winning and losing?

What questions would you add to this incomplete list?

Defining Struggles

We are all familiar with the idea that struggles make us stronger and the more diverse those struggles are the more flexible we can be in managing change. This is the outer struggle that we all have with unforeseen circumstances, misjudgment, lack of proper planning, or caused by others. But I believe that there is an far more important struggle that has a greater responsibility for defining who we are.
I refer here to our inner struggles that no one sees but ourselves.
When someone takes advantage of us do we find some way to retaliate? When someone attacks us personally do we leap into the fight? You get the idea.
We could be very sneaky and find a way for payback that no one but ourselves would know about or we could just let it go knowing that sooner or later that individual we reap the rewards for their actions. We could take the stance that we are not responsible to correct everyone else to our standard of behavior and let it go.
This is the inner struggle and more clearly defines who we are than any external struggle.
Your thoughts?

Freedom

The topic of freedom means many different things depending on who you talk to. However, I believe that we only have one fundamental freedom for everyone. That freedom is to make up our own mind on something.
Too many people have abdicated this freedom in favor of belonging, fitting in, going along, etc..
Making up your own mind does not mean being a dissenter or argumentative but deciding for yourself what is right, good, bad, and so on. Before we can moan about our life we need to make sure that we are exercising our most fundamental right to make up our own mind instead of following public opinion.
Your thoughts?

Seeking Happiness

We all goals that we are actively seeking such as wealth, relationships, dream job, and so on; but, few seem to be actively pursuing happiness. We seem to adopt an attitude that it is beyond our control and just accept and be thankful if it should come.
We need to take responsibility for our own happiness. How? By studying in minute detail all the events and things that make us feel great and actively taking steps to bring more of them into our lives on a consistent basis. We need to pay attention to what is going on in our lives and use that knowledge to make our lives better in every way.
An interesting challenge for those who believe they have no control over how they feel.
Your thoughts?

Twisting Reality

We can be very adept at twisting reality without a great deal of purposeful thought. How do we do this? Think back to any occasion when you wanted something so much that it could be called an obsession. It could be an item, a relationship, an event, well you fill in the blank.
What happens is we lose our perspective. Our intense desire makes us look at unfolding reality with rose colored glasses. We ignore anything that would thwart our accomplishing our desire and focus on any detail that would indicate we would achieve it. A very slanted perspective.
We can often come to believe that we have it within our grasp and are shocked when it evaporates before our eyes. It can be very difficult to keep our perspective in the face of great desire when it is also that desire that focuses us and drives us towards our goals.
Again balance is the key and I have to admit that I have fallen into this trap despite my best efforts.
Have you had this happen to you and what do you do to help yourself?
Your thoughts?

Web of Lies

We all I think have a tendency to want to look good in other peoples eyes. Sometimes this leads to little cover ups or little lies to maintain our image. The trouble is that one lie usually leads to another and before long we can have a web of lies surrounding what was nothing more than an embarrassment.
Perhaps casual or work relationships don't require absolute truth all the time in order to maintain relationships but intimate relationships do. If we have to hide ourselves from our significant others through lies then a time could come when we live the lies and end up destroying the trust of the relationship when found out.
Interesting topic and I would like your comments.

Possessions

The interesting paradox is that we appear not to be free without possessions and yet once we have have them we are again not free. A place to live, food to eat, and something to do that takes care of those needs are necessities when there is only ourselves and multiply as soon as we have others joining our circle such as family or friends.
This is not a bad thing unless we allow it to take over and we become focused on obtaining possessions for their own sake; then it becomes a rat race that takes us further from ourselves. This trade off is something we all have to face and decide for ourselves rather than just going with the flow and ending up in a place we don't want and don't know how we got there.
Awareness and attention is always necessary to make proper and appropriate choices for ourselves.
Your thoughts?

That is Just Who I Am

Whenever I hear someone using those words I immediately think that either they really don't want to change or are afraid of failing to make the change so preempts that by that statement. Certainly speaking for myself change does contain elements of uncertainty and a fear of not accomplishing the change I want to make. Everyone wants to look good to others.
Who we are is simply what we have or our upbringing have conditioned us to being. It is learned behavior, our choice of emotional labels, and our perceptions. Change therefore really deals with the need to change our conditioning. When we look at change in this light then we can expect that change could be difficult but there is no element of failure just learning how we have applied our conditioning to maintain our perception of who we are.
Each set back is simply bringing back into our current awareness the perceptions that we need to work on or being our choice; accepting. Our life and the quality of life is our choice. In either case we can no longer use the excuse that is just who I am.
Your thoughts?

Personal Realities

We really do live in our own unique reality made up of our beliefs, assumptions, emotional content, and mental viewpoint. Because of this we usually take everything that happens in our reality very personally. Every time we get angry, sad, happy, and so on; we are taking things personally.
When we want to make changes it is often our personal reality that becomes our greatest hurdle to making the change we want. Therefore, there can not be a lasting change without altering our personal reality; often, in the form of perception.
For example, if we are constantly upset, angry or sad then we have a gap between our personal reality (perceptions) of what should happen and what actually happens. As reality rarely adjusts to our perceptions then we must adjust our perceptions in order to change our personal reality. Perhaps we are taking things that happen as we live from day to day as being very personal and therefore triggers our emotional response when in fact it was never personal at all.
Our assumptions are our choice and can changed by ourselves and bring a closer match between our expectations and reality and lessening a great deal of our emotional turmoil.
Would be interested in your thoughts on the subject.