When Life Doesn’t Seem to be Getting Any Easier
Have you ever noticed that the same activity can feel monumentally different depending on your circumstances?
If you're an early bird, you can likely complete many times more tasks at 9am than you can at 9pm; if you're a night owl, the opposite may be true. We are affected by times of day, seasons, and myriad other factors. For instance, motivating music boosts' athletes endurance, laughter increases our pain tolerance, and social support helps us achieve our goals. Exotic dancers even earn nearly twice as much in tips when they're ovulating compared to when they menstruate.
People living with episodic bouts of depression, bipolar disorder, or ADHD may sometimes find themselves filled with energy, optimism, and mental clarity, only to find themselves unable to complete a basic task on another day. Add to the picture tremendous forces beyond our control, such as politics and climate change, and we have a potentially dangerous recipe for a sense of failure, inadequacy, and hopelessness.
When life doesn't seem to be getting any easier, we can improve our circumstances through personal empowerment that is guided by self-knowledge.
Personal empowerment entails taking steps to strengthen ourselves physically as well as psychologically so that we are more capable and resilient. Our problems begin to feel lighter to us, not because they have gotten easier in any objective sense, but because we are relatively more capable in relation to our problems.
Personal empowerment has to be guided by self-knowledge in order to be effective. What has gotten in your way of change in the past? Is it possible you haven't fully taken into account your personal quirks, strengths, and weaknesses? What time of day are you most alert? What kinds of situations do you repeatedly forget to plan for? What physical or mental hurdles do you typically experience when you procrastinate? When you know yourself well, accept yourself as you are, and help yourself make real change from there, your plans will take into account the real obstacles you face as well as the actionable changes that will be most likely to help you succeed.
