You will find that people can be truly heroic and not even know it.  It often takes someone else to recognise the hero in us, particulary when we have been stuck in a place of vulnerability and challenge. Being heroic starts with taking full responsibility for everything that is within your sphere of influence. That means your thoughts, feelings, behaviour, general wellbeing and whether or not you continue to grow and develop personally. There is no getting away from it – you have to take full responsibility. No-one else can do it for you.

People who don’t take responsibility for their lives

  • won’t commit to anything

  • dont tell the truth to themselves about themselves

  • don’t value themselves

We all do this to some degree. Different situations and stresses can trigger our feelings of being a victim to life. But the degree to which we engage in these unhelpful ways of being, keeps us moving further away from being the hero in our own lives. And they undermine our ability to understand how the principles of life actually work. And those principles are:

  1. Everything we focus on gets bigger.

  2. Every lie we believe about ourselves gets projected onto others.

  3. When we project onto others we influence how others treat us.

Everything we focus on gets bigger. If you get upset by reports of burglar break-ins, and fear them, your brain will increase your focus on this because our amygdala is trained to watch out for threats to our survival. Before you know it every news item seems to be about breakins because your brain is actively focused and so your mind amplifies it. To undo this we need to turn our focus 180 degrees and deliberately focus on our ability to stay safe. To keep focusing on the problem only helps to increase the problem in our lives. We need to focus on the solutions to every challenge, fear or pain, so that the solutions increase in our lives.

When we believe a lie about ourselves, such as ‘Nobody likes me or cares about me’, we are often not aware we have a deep seated lie (or program) running us. Our belief will make us interpret or misinterpret anything as evidence of this. For example a person may come to work and walk straight past you when you say hello. You immediately interpret that as them not liking you. But they may have just had their dog put down and have loads of other problems they are thinking about. Their head is full of grief and worry about their kids reaction to the death. They simply didn’t register you saying hello.

Projecting our Lies onto Others. So when we project this belief onto the person, we become more guarded and not so friendly towards them. They then pick up a strange vibe from you and they also retreat and don’t bother to engage with you any more. You have just created the lie you believed in the first place. Of course you had no intention to do this, but underlying all this, you are being motivated by your unhelpful subconscious program. Until your conscious mind realises this lie that you tell yourself, you will keep playing to its tune. Because you can’t see where this behaviour has stemmed from, you tell yourself the other person is not very nice and you don’t like them.

The 3 habits I spoke of – of not committing to being responsible for what you create, lying or avoiding the truth, and not valuing ourselves or others keep us stuck.

If you want to get unstuck you have to:

  1. Commit to learning about yourself

  2. Be open to accept the truth about your part in any drama in your life.

  3. Start valuing yourself and others in your life.

Its only by valuing yourself and everyone else as either a friend or a teacher that you can experience each relationship in your life as a positive one. Some of the most challenging people are our best teachers because they make us dig deep to find our own boundaries, wisdom, understanding and compassion. You will only work on yourself if you believe you have value. Many people value their cars and houses more than themselves. They will happily spend thousands on material possessions but don’t invest anything in their own development. They then wonder why their relationships break down, their children don’t like them, their health is awful, and their work is a hellish place to be.

It is your life and your responsibility to manage your life. No-one else can do that for you. Your health, wealth and wisdom depend on you becoming the hero in your own life.

Katie Kalin is a kinesiologist and coach living in Cork Ireland.

www.katiekalin.com     facebook:  katiekalin.com