Whenever life starts taking a turn for the worst, it may seem like nothing you do is right and you can easily feel like you’re stuck in a cycle of bad luck. How do you breakthrough?
I believe the secret to breaking the cycle of bad luck is to empower yourself to take control of your life, creating an action plan that aligns with your life goals and tackling them one at a time.
My Cycle of Bad Luck
Towards the end of 2014, my world felt like it was being turned upside down. I felt stuck in a toxic work environment and I was questioning my career path as a physical therapist.
My problems at work began making it harder for me to handle things at home. It also didn’t help that my 6-figure student loan debt began to weigh down on me. The really sad thing is I just accepted my situation for what it was and I just pushed forward assuming things would get better on its own. A large part of my identity began to fade and I never felt more lost in my life.
Then someone close suddenly passed away. To make matters worse, within a few weeks, I was struck by a van that fractured my lower leg.
I then realized that my life and the people I cared about are too precious for me to sit back and do nothing about my situation.
I stopped blaming lady luck for ignoring me, and I created my own luck.
Within a couple of years, I found myself in a much more supportive work environment. I developed a habit to work out, read and write almost daily. Best of all, I paid off my $115,000 student debt. Now have more bandwidth to focus on the things that matter most to me.
While breaking out of my cycle of bad luck, I learned some life lessons that carry me forward every day.
Challenge Yourself To Take Control
One of the most detrimental things you can do to yourself is relinquishing control by assuming nothing can be done about your situation.
Many of my peers are drowning in student loan debt or expressed feeling stuck in jobs they hate. I didn’t want to be in either boat and needed the motivation to continue making changes.
While digging through motivational content, I stumbled upon a quote by a famous motivational speaker:
“You are the sum total of all your choices up to this present minute”
Brian Tracy (2008). “Universal Laws of Success” >> Buy the book
I visit this idea regularly because it reminds me that I’m in the driver seat of my life. It makes me feel accountable for everything I am trying to accomplish and forces me to do better because no one else is going to do it for me.
Begin With The End In Mind
This is one of the 7 habits of highly effective people in Stephen Covey’s book. By beginning with the end in mind, you are developing a road-map to help ensure that every step you take is a step towards your goal.
Just make sure you really take the time to develop and understand the purpose of your goals to find out if it’s really what you want.
It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted career-wise. By being brutally honest with myself, I found that I wanted an expensive physical therapy certification more for the prestige and recognition rather than to help my patients. This did not align with the reason of why I became a physical therapist. It was to help people. Fortunately, I found myself helping hundreds of people a year without extra letters at the end of my name.
Now I can spend that time and energy towards efforts that better align with my other goals.
So, make sure you know what you want. The last thing you wanted to do is to climb up a ladder as fast as you can only to find that you are on the wrong roof.
You Can Do Anything But Not Everything
This is about being selective about what you want to achieve in your life. It is about focusing things sequentially instead of simultaneously. You will find yourself with better results and less stress.
Combined with putting yourself in the driver seat and following the clear road map on where you need to go, you will inevitably end up at your destination as long as you really want it.
My goal of this blog is to document my family’s path to living a fulfilling, healthy and wealthy lifestyle while creating a platform to share what we learn with others along the way.
If you would like to follow my journey and get future insights on such topics, become sign up for my newsletter.
That’s a pretty powerful message. We often think things just go wrong because they were meant to, but in hindsight, there’s always something you could have “controlled” to prevent that from happening. I took a snapshot of the quote and shared it. Will tweet too;
Thank you very much for sharing. I’m glad this message resonated with you.