Stop Doing That Sh*t: End Self-Sabotage and Demand Your Life Back

by Gary John Bishop

The reality is, you create your experience of life in your self-talk and then act accordingly. And you’re doing it all the time. You’re never (like never, ever) acting upon life itself. What you are acting on is your opinion of life. That’s why it’s such a different experience for each of us.

What makes self-reflection challenging is that you’re both the con artist and the one being conned.

In your earliest years, your life was all about what was going on around you. It wasn’t about you. You were gripped by a compelling curiosity about the world you’d been dropped into. It was all about the discovery of your environment. Your entire life was lived in moments, and you were “there” for all of them. Oh boy, has that changed. These days? These days your life is completely about you, how you’re doing, how you’re not doing, how others are affecting you and have affected you. It’s about fixing you, improving you, altering you, changing you. A life of trying to get to that day in the future when it will all turn out in that perfect happy ending you’ve always imagined.

Except the peace or joy or satisfaction you’re after isn’t “out there” at all. It’s an illusion. It’s clickbait for your brain. That’s right, clickbait. You are hypnotically following that ever-so-tempting juicy morsel of hope or stability or success or accomplishment, only to get there and realize that ain’t it.

The unrest and edginess of the desire to have things perfect is followed by the hopelessness of realizing that they never really are.

You have to be willing to own your life for how it is, no blame, no anger, no resentment. It went the way it did, you turned out the way you did, and now it’s game on and into the future we go.

Your truth is NOT the truth to anyone but you, and if your truth does not light you up, it might be time for you to come up with another one.

Once established, these truths of yours go deeper and reach further out and begin to take over your life, reaching all the way back from the past and crawling into your future like an existential shadow. You’re hooked on them. And I mean hooked.

On one hand, you can never change the past, but on the other, you can choose to change how you see and explain it. Which in turn changes how you feel about it. Which then, in every sense of the word, changes the past for you. At the very least how it impacts you.

As soon as your eyes open you are in a familiar location, and no, I don’t mean in your bed. It’s actually more like in your head! This isn’t the world that greets you every morning but rather your unique world. A world filled with your nuances and triggers and biases from that distinct and unique point of experience that you have. You are completely shaped by those three saboteurs in a way that, until now, has been explained by you in terms of moods or emotions or behaviors or circumstances.

you are hardwired for safety, for your world to be a familiar and certain one. For the familiarity of those deep-seated conclusions no matter how unsavory or limiting they might be, to keep your existence connected to something, anything that you can make sense of, the kind of internal conundrum that supports you being distracted and occupied and ultimately lost in the safety of your own little reality.

You are pursuing “being” a different you, the kind of you who solves the dilemma of the current you, to somehow relieve the weight of your point of experience.

You, my insatiable friend, are an expression of being. Your authentic self-expression is a limitless broadcasting of what it is to “be.” Yet you, like most human beings, rather than express happiness or love or passion, pursue those things with the idea that they are somehow attainable! You are a human being. Yet you live as if you have some kind of limit or scarcity of being, and therefore you have become a human “doing”-to-eventually-“be.” That thing you are after, the target of that pursuit, you ALREADY ARE!

When you shift your attention to what genuinely interests, inspires, or invigorates you, whatever was on your mind, whatever direction you were headed, is now altered. You’ve authentically pivoted, and your mind, your actions, and your focus are now engrossed in what naturally lights you up.

Buckminster Fuller, the twentieth-century inventor and visionary, said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Life is nothing but a grand experiment, an opening in a moment in history to shout, scream, love, live, and die, but you won’t do that by sitting on your ass worrying about the right thing to do with your life.

Try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else! That’s the beauty of this. It’s an exploration of what it is to be alive. Every day, several times a day, sometimes hundreds of times a day and for countless days to come, you have to ask yourself, “What is my future telling me to do right now?” Whatever the answer is, big or small, ACT ON IT!

Do you know what life really is? It’s an opportunity for you to play with the skinbag you were given. To try it out, to take it for a ride, to work that thing to its very limit, to live this life before you fucking die. The certainty you’ve been craving? That’s it right there. You’ll die. Between now and then, you have this glorious opportunity to go beyond everything you’ve ever known yourself as. To be the most effective, loving, forgiving, adventurous, passionate, committed, understanding, successful, and creative human being you can muster until you’re out of time. To look the people in your life straight in the eye and be the kind of human being you’ve always wanted to be. Authentic.