I can’t take it anymore! I don’t want to live this way!
What is it going to take to change my life?
These are statements I hear all the time from people. Life can be frustrating. Life in these times can be particularly frustrating. There is a phrase that has been true for as long as time. In recent times, it has become a “buzz phrase” if there is such a thing.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you want your life to change, you have to evaluate each aspect of it and determine what are the anchors that are preventing true change from occurring. Some things need to be reprioritized. Others need to be cut off completely. Too often, our passions and desires cloud the issues and make it difficult to know which is which.
In my own life, I was anchored between two conflicts. One the one hand, I am compassionate to a fault.
I am the typical “Take in the stray three-legged dog” guy.
I have a heart for people and want to see them succeed – at any cost. Unfortunately, that cost has often proven to be one that I am willing to pay more than being the price that the one I am helping is willing to pay. That is a dangerous and expensive problem. As a minister raised in a minister’s home, I can attest that a curse of ministry is the tendency to pay that price at the expense of one’s own family.
Or, family itself can be the problem. This weekend a friend of mine jokingly (but pointedly) made the statement, “If you can effectively overcome the demands and judgment of family, you can easily handle any demon in hell.” For some, I would have to admit there is probably a truth in that. After all, I have helped a lot of people wade through family situations, and when selfishness is involved,
the rules that will keep family close are the
same ones that allow for the greatest damage.
In any case, my compassion for people has often lead me to sacrifice beyond what is reasonable or even righteous. I become an enabler rather than an agent of empowerment. This conflicts with the forward momentum in my own life and success.
The second conflict occurs when in helping such a person I get to the place where enough is enough.
For me, the flip side of compassion is cynicism.
It is the by-product of helping those who insist on being enabled rather than empowered. I have a sanguine personality. If you have studied personality traits, you know this means that I am fun loving, energetic, engaging, trusting and optimistic…and an extremist. These are traits that, tied to compassion, make it possible for me to keep paying the aforementioned price that too often proves costly and ineffective. For me to stop paying that price is always an extreme decision.
My protection device seems to be the embracing of cynicism. Because I believe that there HAS to be a way for it to work, when I come to the reality that for whatever reason it cannot or will not, I tend to go from being extremely positive to extremely negative. The willingness of others to live in failure somehow becomes MY failure. What did I do or NOT do that prevented a win here? Making this break fuels cynicism and turns me into someone that I have no desire to be. I go from being extremely positive to EXTREMELY NEGATIVE, which is dangerous for a sanguine. Because we are extreme, when we get negative, we get REALLY negative! Because we are outspoken and usually the loudest voice in the room, we can really
My greatest conflict was found halt between these two extremes.
How long do I fight for the win for someone who needs change but is unwilling to change, and how do I let go of the fight to bring that change without taking on the responsibility of what can amount to certain failure if I do?
Then I realized that the anchor holding me back was not the decision of who to prioritize and what fight to fight, but that
the true anchor that was preventing me from success was my inability to see what responsibility is mine and what
responsibility belongs to someone else.
It is my job to influence. It is my desire to bring change. It is not my responsibility to make the decision for them. Discovering this helped me cut loose the real anchor that was stopping my progress, for me and for my family.
The professionals call this co-dependency. As long as I was willing to “hang in” until others made the right decision, their wrong decisions prevented me from moving forward. I could blame their unwillingness to change, but in the end, the inability for me to move was not their fault, but my own. I was the one responsible for balance in my life. In short, cutting the anchor was not simply about cutting someone off, but determining what price I was willing to pay (and ask my family to pay) for his or her success.
What is it going to take to change your life? You must look through the circumstances and situations you are facing and find the TRUE anchors. Be honest with yourself and deal with them. Then you can move forward!
