• 1. Get Over Yourself
• 2. Get a Life
• 3. Be Honest
• 4. Be self responsible
• 5. “Go out of your mind, and come to your senses.” (Fritz Perls)

1. Get over Yourself

When I lead sem­i­nars and work­shops, I invari­ably start the things with danc­ing, and my favourite first song is ‘Get over It,’ by The Eagles. The song is a none-too-subtle reminder that the ‘Cult of Vic­tim­iza­tion’ is alive and well, espe­cially in North Amer­ica. We live in an age where peo­ple want com­plete free­dom and no respon­si­bil­ity. (see # 4). This plays out in lots of weird behaviour—and when things go south, the fin­ger point­ing starts.

Get­ting over your­self involves deter­mined effort at no blame. Now, that’s not the same as say­ing ‘any­thing goes.’ We need to step up to the plate and decry the present state of our planet, but a whole lot of whin­ing does noth­ing. We change the world by chang­ing our­selves. And I mean that lit­er­ally and practically.

Blam­ing sim­ply puts the onus onto some­one or some­thing else (the gov­ern­ment, the church, par­ents, whomever) while the blamer feels all self-righteous. Here is a hint: as soon as you blame any­one or any­thing for where you are and who you are, you have just become a vic­tim. And I don’t care what we are talk­ing about here. It is non­sen­si­cal to dwell on sto­ries of being hard-done-by. The only valid ques­tion is: “Given my life so far, what shall I do dif­fer­ently, so as to shift the situation?”

Dwelling on the inter­nal “I was so badly treated” sce­nario changes pre­cisely noth­ing. You are not required to approve of what hap­pened in the past. You are required to move heaven and earth to get past it. Obsess­ing about it changes nothing.

Remem­ber: argue for your lim­i­ta­tions, and they are yours. Define your­self as a poor help­less vic­tim, and you are one. Magic. If you do not like where you are right now, the only thing that will change this is you doing some­thing (any­thing!) differently.

2. Get a Life

I’m not so big on “every­one has a des­tiny to ful­fill.” I hate New Age clap­trap like that. I do believe that each of us is here with a skill set and a set of attrib­utes and abil­i­ties that is as unique to us as our fingerprints.

In other words, you are it, as far as your ‘model’ goes. Talk about a lim­ited pro­duc­tion unit!

The world likely is not going to end if you choose to sit on your butt and do noth­ing but put in time. Thoreau was right—most peo­ple live lives of quiet des­per­a­tion. I won­der about that, though. It’s as if fit­ting in and not mak­ing waves is a rea­son­able life choice.

Many are the peo­ple I know who go through the motions for decades and arrive at 60 or so, going, “Now what?”, or “What was that all about?” Oth­ers seem to be in that state in their 30s. Well, what it’s “all about” is show­ing up for your life.

Notice the pronoun—‘your.’ You are not here to be what your mommy wants you to be. You are not here to ‘fol­low in your father’s foot­steps.’ You are not here to fol­low the rules and not make waves, or to fol­low some archaic set of rules found in out­dated holy books.

You are here to carve out space that is yours alone.

Think about ‘famous peo­ple’ that come to mind—and for the most part, let us leave pop stars out of this equa­tion. I’m think­ing Mar­tin Luther King, Gandhi, Man­dela, Edi­son, etc. What makes them spe­cial? They applied their per­son­al­ity and skill set to the world they lived in, and in a sense, bent the world to their will. I do not think they were ‘spe­cial’ peo­ple in the sense of unique. I think they were spe­cial because they chose to act.

Notic­ing a pat­tern here? I believe that action is the real key to liv­ing a meaning-filled life. And the only action you can take is the action you take. In other words, if you don’t do it, it won’t hap­pen. And the world gets a lit­tle weirder and more bor­ing as a result.

Remem­ber: Only you can bring forth what you can bring forth, and the only time you can do it is now. The paint­ing that is your life is only real when you stop think­ing about it and actu­ally paint it.

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