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How do you live your life? At cause or at effect? Which you choose can make all the difference in how you live your life. There are not many people who always their life at cause. Most of us live a large proportion of our lives at effect -- responding to the whims, desires or emotional states of others. We are thus thrown about on the ocean of life like some jetsam at sea.
Being at cause means that you are decisive about creating what you want in life. You see the world as a place of constant opportunities of which you are in a position to explore and try out. And if certain paths do not unfold as you would like, then you take action to change the path to somewhere else. You also take responsibility for all the difficult things in life even if it seems like the fault of others. At the very least you take responsibility for how you react to those difficulties, be they people or events.
If you are at effect, however, there is always a reason why life has not worked out and there is always someone or something at fault or blocking you from what you want to achieve. This leads to a sense of powerlessness and despondency about life and you lament ‘if only he or she were different' or 'why is it that this bad luck always happens to me.’ You are, in effect, a victim of circumstances.
The truth is that there is no way to prove how much choice we have in determining our future, but there is ample evidence to show that those people that do take on the attitude that they are responsible for everything that happens in life – are also the people that really get what they want out of life and are successful.
Being at cause also helps us release much of the emotional burden that we place on ourselves in regard to our responsibilities for others. Indeed we must always do the best we can by others, but ultimately, they themselves are also responsible for how they choose to respond to anything we do and say. If a friend is unhappy despite our best efforts to cheer him up, we do not need to hold the emotional stress of thinking that we must do more.
One of the axioms that I live my life by comes from the field of NLP. And that is ‘There is no failure only feedback’. This means that everything that goes wrong in life is a disguised teaching in some way. If only to say – ‘don’t do that again!’ It is a great way to ensure that you are living at cause.
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