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I was watching a movie called, “The Answer Man” many years ago. It came out in 2009 and starred Jeff Daniels. He plays a reclusive author of a mega-hit self-help book who basically got tired of people asking him for life advice because they think he can talk to God.
He befriends two people, a woman he is dating and a troubled young man.
One day, the young man finally earns the right to ask Daniel’s character, Arlen Faber, a question.
He asks: Why can’t I do the things I want to do? There’s so much I know I’m capable of that I never actually do. Why is that?
Faber responds: The trick is to realize that you’re always doing what you want to do… always. Nobody’s making you do anything. Once you get that, you see that you’re free and that life is really just a series of choices. Nothing happens to you. You choose.
And, of course, the young man walks away feeling cheated as if he hadn’t received the magical idea that would change his life.
But, he had received the sword that would cut the strings he felt were controlling his life if he understood it.
It’s hard to process.
We live in a society of “should” and “have to”. We grow up being coached on how we will live our lives and what will define happiness for us. They are parameters set by other people based on what they believed would make them happy and what they were told. They are passed down from generation-to-generation with no intervention or addition of the truth of what generations actually experienced despite their achievement.
There is no encyclopedia that will tell you how people actually felt after they graduated college, got a job, bought a house and had 2.5 children which meant they reached, “The American Dream.” It doesn’t tell you if they were actually satisfied.
There is the silent agreement that we don’t talk about whether what we are doing is making us happy. We just smile and post pictures on Instagram of our perfect life.
What is challenging is to understand that even when you are doing what you think you “should” or “have to” that you are still making the choice to do it?
It might have been encoded in your DNA, drilled into you as an expectation or you may think it’s the “right thing to do”, but you are choosing it as your reality. There are other choices that could be made.
For many of us, we treat our beliefs and experiences as if they are the limits and boundaries to what we are capable of. They are the constraints of what we will allow ourselves to be and do until we give ourselves permission to do something else.
I’m not saying this is easy. There are few societal payoffs for doing what everyone else is afraid to do until it works out in your favor and people can see the fruits of your labor.
When you have been made to believe something or told something repeatedly, it is hard to convince yourself that the opposite is a possibility.
You may even have to find proof that the opposite exist or could be a possible
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Some of us are able to create things that don’t exist just because we believe that anything is possible.
But, it always requires us to give ourselves permission.
Sometimes, it’s permission to dream. It might be permission to love someone or something different. It may be permission to walk away from something we were once committed to. It could be permission to say, No.
But, you have to choose first and then empower yourself with permission.
And, once your realize that you are the leading authority of everything that happens in your life and the one who approves your decisions as well as the one who deals with the consequences; you can take risks and do things that you may not have previously done.
You also have to give yourself permission to make mistakes and bad decisions. Then, you have to trust yourself to rebound from them.
And, that’s when you become free.
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Photo courtesy Unsplash.