Be honest with yourself – especially when things are not going as planned.
Being self-aware and acknowledging when things are not going to plan in a straightforward and honest way is one of the hardest things for many of us to do. We live in a world of constant perfection, where we always try to show others, we are doing fine and struggle more and more to admit mistakes and come clean when things are getting a bit out of hand or are not going to plan at all. First, that is ok. It really is, not everything in our lives will always go to plan and we cannot always be strong with everything. The important thing however is to be honest with ourselves, understand our problems and see steps we might want to take to take things back into our own hands in a constructive and active way.
The first step here, is to be self-honest with us, to cut through all the noise of distractions and realize that we are not happy with the status quo of our live at the very moment in time. The first step towards any kind of improvement here is to realize that we are unhappy as only then can we start working on it. Once we know that things don’t feel quite right for us now, we can start working on a plan of improvement. However, in a social media driven world where constant perfections seem to often be the new norm that influencers and others try to sell us each day, telling ourselves that we are not as great as we thought we would be right now can be the hardest thing to do. However, it is ok to show weaknesses, and take some time to work on us as this will be the first step towards improvement.
After self-realization here and being honest with us to help acknowledge our current unhappiness and also potential issues we might face that lead us here, it is really also about understanding exactly those issues which helps us draw up a plan for change but also not take get ourselves into a similar situation all over again in the near future. Only when we really look inside will we see why we ended up in this situation in the first place, and it is vital to understand and reflect on this to be able to go into the next stage, the action to bring about change.
After we know we are unhappy and have an understanding why we ended up there in the first place, now is the time to make that plan to bring about change. We should after all those steps of self-realization and understanding have a clear idea of what we need to change moving forward to get back on track with our lives. Now while this might be clearer to us know, this can also be very hard to implement in practice, as it might require quite significant work and effort on our side. We might really have to change and adjust the way we go used to do things and make some hard decisions and sacrifices. Also, what makes it harder, there will be no guarantee of success at least for the start. However, we still must do this in order to bring about change, which is usually associated with quite a bit of work on our end. Remember, we went into this because we were unhappy with how things were in the first place so we might as well put the work in here.
There really are three stages of bringing about positive change when we feel stuck in our lives. One, being honest with ourselves that we have a problem and issues, second identifying what those are and thirdly to design a plan of actions to bring about this positive change while at the same time really trying to implement it even if this needs a lot of effort from our side.
