Are you in the Waiting Room of Life?

Are you waiting for life to happen to you? Do you feel that you are sitting in a waiting room and that in the next room you can see through the window where true life is being experienced by other people? Do you want to enter that room but don’t know how to get in–can’t find the key? If you found the key, you believe that with your luck, the key would probably get stuck in the lock or break into two. Many people experience these negative thoughts. Continually thinking in this way will result in you becoming exhausted, bored, lethargic and having no interest in life generally. Negative thinking can also cause depression and anxiety. If you think in this way you will remain in the ‘waiting room of life’ forever.

If you want to live a fulfilling life you have to set about creating it.

Here are three steps on how you can achieve this:

• The first step is to think about what you really want for yourself in your life.
• The second step is to think about what you need to change about yourself and your circumstances in order to get what you want.
• The third step is to create a plan, complete with identified targets set along the way to enable you to achieve your ultimate goal. Make sure your targets and goal are realistic and achievable.

Ask yourself, ‘do you feel energised and excited by this thought?’ If you do, perhaps this is an indication that the time has come to put these thoughts into action!

Don’t expect anything from anyone else

You will only be disappointed if you have high expectations of your partner or other people. Ask yourself, ‘are you always ready to blame your partner, or other people, for not making you happy, for not giving you the love and the life you want, for not providing you with a comfortable existence? If you are guilty of doing this then you are a behaving like a ‘victim and a poor me’.
If you place the burden of responsibility on to your partner or someone else to provide you with the life you want you are putting this person under considerable pressure, (albeit unintentionally), to give you what you want. Why do you do this? You do it because you don’t believe you are capable of providing these things for yourself. I have had these thoughts myself. I didn’t believe in myself. I believed that my career and my life, as I knew it, was over. I was convinced that I was on the rubbish heap and I felt that I was powerless to change the course of my future. Up to that point I had a successful career and a loving family but I, unconsciously, brainwashed myself into believing that I was incapable of accomplishing anything for myself and that I was just lucky to have these things in my life. I had no self-worth or self-confidence. I had no faith in my ability to give myself what I needed and wanted. I accepted these labels I gave myself, and they hung, heavily, over my head. I opted out of responsibility and accountability. I felt overwhelming gratitude, to my partner, for continuing to provide me with a good quality of life through his effort and endeavours. I didn’t realise, during the time this was happening, that the perception I had of myself was due to my own repeating negative thought patterns that drip-fed me by repeating negative statements that resulted in me giving up being responsible for myself and consequently shifting the responsibility to my partner to take total control over me and my life.
We must all think for ourselves and not put the responsibility for your happiness on another person. Live by the motto, “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.”

Author's Bio: 

'Lynda Bevan lives in a picturesque village in South Wales, United Kingdom. She is 60 years
of age, married for the third time, with three (adult) children. During her teens and early twenties she pursued and enjoyed acting and taught at local Youth Centres.

Her 20 year career has involved working, in the area of mental health, with the two major care agencies in the UK, Social Services and the National Health Service.

After the birth of her third child, and with her second marriage ending, she became employed by Social Services and climbed through the ranks to senior management level with some speed.

During her career with Social Services she developed a passion for counselling and psychotherapy and worked extensively with mental health patients, within the organisation, setting up counselling projects in the Primary |Health-care Setting to tackle the issue of doctors who referred patients, inappropriately, to Psychiatric Hospitals for therapy for events that arise in normal everyday life, i.e. divorce, anxiety, depression, bereavement, stress, loss of role. It was during this time that she became involved in marital/relationship counselling and, coincidentally, was experiencing difficulties within her own relationship. The experience of working in this environment, and her own relationship issues, enabled Lynda to be innovative; creating methods of coping and developing strategies that enabled her and, consequently, patients to live within their difficult relationships. These strategies were devised and offered to patients who had clearly identified that they did not want to separate or proceed with the divorce process.

After taking early retirement from Social Services, she became employed by the National Health Service, as a Counsellor in the Primary Health-Care Setting. During this 10 year period in her career she began using the strategies, she had developed, with patients who were referred for relationship counselling and who did not want to end their partnership/marriage. This strategy (10 step guide) has been used extensively over a 10 year period with impressive results.

Lynda has lectured on the PGCE Course at Swansea Business Institute teaching counselling skills to post-graduate students. She has also run workshops on self-development and psychodrama at Swansea University.

Lynda is presently employed as a Manager of a charity that provides services and supports people who are HIV positive or who have AIDS. She is also the Resident Relationship Counsellor on Swansea Sound Radio.