Stop accepting things you should change

Viktor Frankl once said, in his memoir Man's Search for Meaning: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

And this is something I think about often.

Because I see a majority of people get this completely backwards. They don't choose their attitude about their circumstances. They just go with whatever their default dictates, and what's even worse is that their "default" is woefully unhelpful.

Specifically:

People usually resist against things they can't change, spending massive amounts of time and emotional energy lamenting what is and wishing it weren't like that. Resisting against the reality of their circumstances in total futility.

Meanwhile:

They're also passively accepting things that they could change, not investing their time and energy into creating change in the areas that they can and should take control over.

Which just leads to a massive amount of misery.

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In Viktor Frankl's case, he was in Nazi concentration camps. Nothing he could do would change that fact. So he took control over the one thing he could - his own attitude and perspective. And while so many around him had given up and were completely hopeless, he maintained an attitude that carried him through those times.

He survived, and stayed sane too, by taking control of what he could control.

To use a more timely analogy:

I have a client, J, who'd just accepted that porn would be part of his lifestyle forever. Being in his 50's, he'd made some decent attempts to quit over the years, but they'd each ended in failure and ultimately... he'd pretty much given up. So he had this huge thorn in his side that was totally messing up his confidence, mental health, and his marriage, and yet he wasn't taking control over it.

Meanwhile he was internally resisting circumstances that he truly couldn't change, like certain chronic health problems that there was no readily available solution to... lamenting and wondering "why me?" which reinforced his brain's perceived need for the escape-hatch that is porn. Just to give one small example.

Which, sadly but unsurprisingly, was a dynamic that created a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Eventually he reached one of the most powerful places a man can possibly reach:

He got f**king fed up.

And decided to take a more head-on, scorched-earth approach to the issue by reaching out to and hiring me to help him quit. And together, we did exactly that. He'd never had proper guidance, support, or the right techniques before. So I helped by giving him the frameworks and direct 1-on-1 support he needed to take control over that habit and exit the cycle he'd been stuck in for so many years.

It worked.

As of this writing he's been clean for over 17 months, since not long after we initially met.

And not-so-incidentally, the problems he'd been having with his mental health, marriage, etc have basically evaporated in the wake of the changes he's made.

So if there's anything in your life that you've just been accepting, that truthfully you should be dedicating yourself to changing...

Well, it's time to take control where possible.

Starting with that porn habit that's still been hanging on.

Download the BeFree App today and take the first step toward reclaiming control over your life.