It is up to you
Scott Miker
One of the biggest benefits to using the systems and habits approach to improvement is that it gives us empowerment. It takes control over our life and puts it in our hands, not someone else’s.
Too often in life we see how external forces influence us. It could be a string of bad luck or someone treating us unfairly. But these external forces often become excuses rather than reasons because we allow them to control us.
When you start to take small steps towards improvement and start to create the systems in your life instead of just letting them form, you will start to realize the great control you have over your own life.
Yes there are external factors in life. Yes some people have bad luck or get treated unfairly. But more often than not, we are active participants. We respond to situations and make decisions that provide the real benefit or consequence to that outside force.
If we are unhappy about being fired from our job, we can have many responses. We can sulk. We can sue. We can feel like a victim. We can use this to motivate us to get something better. We can work on improving the areas that caused the termination.
Our response is what matters, even more than what actually happens to us. The systems and habits approach to improvement focuses on the patterned behavior in our life, which is how we design our response.
We can start to develop our response to obstacles and stress. We can start to design how we learn and grow from our experiences. By evaluating and then making consistent, small steps in the direction that we want to go, we can start to take back control and have us leading the way forward.
This changes our perspective on life because it gives us a path forward. It allows us to choose how we want to move forward and then design the structures, mental models and patterns to follow that direction.
It isn’t easy and takes time to fully grasp this control. But if we continue to make progress and focus on making consistent, small steps in the direction that we want to go, we can gain the ability to grow and improve in the way we choose.
It becomes less about everything external having control over us and becomes more about how we make choices based on the full system in order to get what we want.
We see the daily, recurring choices we make and understand how they often determine who we are. Then we can change those daily choices to take us towards our idea of success. Over time we will start to gain more and more control over our life. Then we will finally realize that our life is up to us, not anyone else.