Are You Sabotaging Your Success?

You create your own life. You do it with your thoughts, your words, and your actions. You’re doing it every second of every day.
This is a hard concept for a lot of people to accept. It means accepting full responsibility for everything that happens in your life, including the things that happen “to” you. (Think: traffic, divorce, accidents). However, it’s scientific fact. That’s right, scientists have proven that what you think actually creates your reality. (I will not go into the specifics, as I am by no means a scientist, but feel free to read books such as Power vs. Force, The Answer, and The Secret.)
If you think about it in a purely logical way, it also makes sense: when you think about something, you usually react to it. Notice the word “act” in “re-act.” You’re re-sponding to the thought in the form of an act-ion.
When you start taking full responsibility for your life, you actually create more power. Now the word “power” is often distorted and brings to mind images of greasy politicians and such. Let’s discard that image and replace it with one that puts YOU in control [of your own life]. That means that if you can create something you can un-create it. This is very similar to how we can learn things and then un-learn them.
For instance, perhaps you’ve amassed a large amount of debt. You could play the victim and blame it on student loans, credit card companies, your mortgage, your broker, your spend-a-holic ex-wife, or God*. That option is a pretty dismal one as it strips you of your power and hands it off to someone (or something) else. If you were to own up to the fact that you did, indeed, create this debt, then that means that you’re in full control! You can eliminate that debt in the same way you created it: through your actions. And you already know precisely which actions lead to debt, so doing the opposite is a good start to paying it off.
If we can go back to that example for a moment and extract a thought: God. Whatever you choose to call that god, it is often used as an excuse for when things don’t go our way. We are more than happy to own our achievements but “God caused the rain, traffic, accident, fill-in-the-blank.” Regardless of your beliefs about the existence of an omniscient being, God is used to take power out of your own hands. If it’s “all up to God,” then you disown the power that is your God-given right. Every holy scripture mentions in some way that “the glory of God is within us.” Yogis use it every day when they say “Namaste,” which means “the God in me recognizes the God in you.” Own that power. Use it to make a difference.
TAKE ACTION:
Next time something happens “to” you or things don’t go your way, ask yourself, “Where am I not taking responsibility for my life? How did I create this moment/situation?”

*(Please feel free to substitute whatever you’d like for the word “God”).