Who is that person who shows up wherever you go?

When life gets tough, we’re stressed, overwhelmed or just plain miserable we tend to look for things to blame – It’s the job, the town I live in, this house, my partner, and then the grass starts to become greener the other side.

So, we make big changes, move house, town or even country, get a new job or end up finishing a relationship as we find more and more things we don’t like in our partner and we start a new.

The new job is great, the new relationship is perfect and you love the place you live in – for a while at least, but, inevitably, sooner or later who shows up to spoil the party?

You do!

I spent the first 15 years of my career in the IT industry, for a few years it would be great, but I didn’t recognise that I was in a self sabotaging circle of behaviour.

I would start a new job full of motivation enthusiasm and energy and I would quickly shine. I didn’t find it difficult to be successful, I put in 100% with a positive mental attitude and I was good at my job. But after 2 years I started to hit a wall (or ceiling, whatever you like to call it).

I would become despondent I would feel like I couldn’t get any further, I was banging my head against the wall, or ceiling and every day became a slog.

Being in IT at the time and successful, it was easy to change jobs, so I did and I would start the cycle again.

This went on for years until gradually the cycle shortened, the two years honeymoon period became six months and then it just got hard, I hated it and I was burned out

– or so I thought.

So I crashed and burned and left my lucrative career – for good.

I changed direction completely, took off for Nepal and started a social enterprise business, all what great for a while, until the recession hit in 2008, the business became financially unviable and I had to look for another form of income, so what did I do?

I returned to what I knew – the IT industry, and guess what – that same cycle of behaviour returned, but this time much quicker than before. Six years on nothing had changed about the IT industry, because nothing had changed about me.

The point is, you are and will be wherever you go. Your habits and self sabotaging patterns of behaviour stay with you, unless you decide to change.

Changing circumstances in our lives change things temporarily but changing ourselves changes things permanently. Whether you do change or not is a choice?

We are not fixed as people or personalities, everyone can change, if they want to. And that is the vital word ‘want’ . Want is far more powerful than ‘need’.

And, you can’t change other people, you may thing they need to, but until they see the need to change and want to change, there is nothing you can do about them, but you can change your attitude towards them.

If life is hard, you’re angry or anxious or you seem to run into conflicts with other people regularly, then perhaps there is something you need to learn.

The best investment you can ever make is in yourself.

If you have a problem to solve that seems overwhelming or you just hit the same walls again and again, perhaps you’re passed up for promotion or you seem to attract the same type of person in a relationship rather than looking for an external reason or issues from your past, you could grow yourself to be bigger than the problem from within.

Become bigger than the problem and the problem will seem trivial, easy to deal with or even so insignificant it doesn’t warrant your attention any more.

Learn how to be happy and confident from the inside and life will become easy, people will become easy and you will become a joy to be around.