Is it fate or something else?

As we move through our life there are many phenomenon that we can’t explain. We don’t understand why we didn’t get that promotion, or we can’t figure out why our relationship went sour.

We can’t understand why so we assume it must be some magical reason. We say it is luck. Or we say it is fate. We justify it by saying we skipped some random good deed so this must be Karma paying us back.

I remember a few years ago hearing a collegiate athlete talk about how the team struggled towards the end of the season. He said he didn’t understand it and it must be fate.

A few weeks after the season, reports started coming out about the team’s performance. Apparently, there were players that were using drugs and alcohol before the games. They would smoke pot and then go play the game. They would binge drink the night before and not realize that the hangover might slow them down.

When performance suffered, they assumed it was outside of their control. It must have been bad luck. Or they assumed it was poor officiating. Whatever it was, they couldn’t connect the aspects of the system that they controlled to the results. They didn't see how they were responsible for the failures of the team.

Even when this information came to light, players would dismiss the impact. They would explain that they have always done these things before games. They won in the past with this behavior so that can’t be reason they are losing now.

This might be an extreme example, but it highlights the fact that we often ignore our own role in our life. Instead we want to find external reasons for the bad parts of life. We can take credit for the good things we have done but those bad parts are such a blind spot to most.

But to improve our life and learn to live to our fullest potential, we have to uncover these aspects of life. We have to face them. We have to acknowledge them. We have to own them.

It might be painful as we discover that fate didn’t cause some major disappointment. We may discover that we were the reason we missed the mark and failed.

Sure, luck might be present, but that doesn’t mean that our own poor decision meant nothing. Could we have overcome that bad luck with the right attitude and work ethic?

The systems and habits approach to improvement is all about uncovering these aspects of life. This approach looks to systems thinking to see that things aren’t usually as black and white as we assume. They are a mix of grey, with elements all interconnecting and interacting at all times.

We start to make the connections to various aspects of the system. They we can start to see what we control. Those elements that we have the ability to adjust are the ones where we focus.

We start to change behaviors. We start to challenge our thoughts. We start to do the things necessary to succeed. We dismiss outside factors since we don’t have control over them. We know they are present, but we don’t spend our time trying to use them as scapegoats.

This is a freeing exercise even though it feels uncomfortable. We start to realize how much we are responsible for in life. We see how we created the bad things in life as much as the good things.

But keep going. Through this we can start to change the course of our life. We can start to gain control of our behaviors. We can modify our thoughts. We can start to create new patterns that help us improve. Over time we can drastically change who we are and how we provide value to the world.