We’ve all got a plethora of reasons why we say we are ‘where we don’t want to be in life’.

And many of them are justifiable. However most of them only serve to keep us stuck.

Whether it’s ‘I haven’t got enough money’, I’m not smart enough, I hate my job, I’m depressed, I’m anxious, I’ve got low self-esteem, I’ve got no friends, I wish I had a girlfriend/boyfriend/husband wife/kids/house/dog/cat, my wife ran off with the best man, the dogs just ate the sofa, the cars just been written off, I’ve just been diagnosed with xyz, I haven’t got enough time to do ABC, if it wasn’t for the kids I sail round the world, – the fact remains that usually, inside of this internal or external dialogue with ourselves and with those who will listen, we tend to stay focused on the problem, what’s wrong about it and in a type of victim mode.

And I say victim, but looking at it more closely from my own personal perspective, it’s more a sense of being trapped inside of a feeling of ‘helplessness’.

Whatever the reasons our default setting is usually to sit inside of the label.

If we haven’t got enough money we look outside to those who have and how it’s not fair.

We compare what we haven’t got financial with others rather than what we have compared to others less fortunate.

We blame the government, the immigration issue, we attack those who seem to be getting money for nothing and are driving around it a much newer car than us!
We say we will have to cut back, no more holidays and nights out etc all of which all add to the problem in terms of making us bitter and cynical and victims of circumstance.

And I know I often fall foul of the ‘this is not fair’ mind set. We all do.

And we all know all too well what often it isn’t fair. All around people are getting more than us.

They are getting away with more than us. They are doing less than us but getting more than us!

People are even being given more than us and are all it seems much luckier than us.

And that’s life.

And don’t forget we are ‘those people’ who have more, according to those who have much less than us……but we never consider that!

So what can we do to hack this mind-set to help us be more constructive in our response to what seems like a badly dealt hand.

Well one very simple why is to use one particular word at the end of our complaints and reasons why we are not happy.

And that word is ‘And?’.

I’m depressed.
And?

I’m lonely.
And?

I hate my Job.
And?

Bear with me, as I appreciate this seems a bit basic and almost uncaring. Even unrealistic when the shit is really hitting the fan.

But try it by yourself first rather than getting someone else to help you, because having someone else – especially family members aggressively saying ‘And?’ after you plead for their sympathetic agreement in a vain hope that they would just agree and say ‘there,there’.

Because using this idea by ourselves will help prevent us coming up with and feeling of resentment and a sense of being attacked, that it may do if someone else asks ‘And?’ after we’ve just poured our hearts out.

This would certainly only serve to ensure we will then spend our time defending why we are where we don’t want to be, rather than looking at why we are there and how we can get out of it.

When we are complaining about something we rarely look at what is really behind our complaint. The discussion is always about the label – I am skint, depressed, anxious, lonely, overworked, unhappy etc.

We never like to look at why we are feeling the way we do and the solutions to the ‘real’ issue.

Why? Surely none of us want to deliberately stay somewhere we don’t want to be, right?

Well, we sort of do.

Because even when we are having a bad time, we are usual familiar with it. And we all like familiarity.

It’s usually a complaint we have had for years and despite often hating it, we have learnt to accept it, make excuses for it and live with it, even though we moan about it all day!

It’s actually, in a perverse way – in our minds anyway – harder to actually do something about it than it is to live with it.

Why?

Because change takes work that also usually comes with very slow progress. Things often get worse before they get better.

There’s no guarantees that what we are attempting to do will even work and we may even end up worse than before.

Being stuck where we don’t want to be may ‘suck ass’, but we know we can handle it. We have proof.

There’s a sense of certainty that we can handle it. Even though it’s maybe a shitty reality it’s familiar.

We don’t risk anything personally to continue doing it – It’s never our fault if we stay as we are – it’s out there happening ‘too us’.  We are safer in our misery.

And remember this is all unconscious. But because we crave safety, we defend it by blaming someone else rather than taking the blame/responsibility and doing what has to be done to rectify it.

Logically this is madness. Emotionally, and under the bonnet, it makes total sense.

Using the word ‘And?’ every time we are attempting to blame our circumstances can help us snap out of ‘where we would rather be’, and put us back to ‘where we are’ and not where the rest of the world is in comparison to us.

Its stops us being hand held and gets us, as one of my old bosses used to say to me ‘off the tit’.

It forces us to take responsibility and to address where we are and what we can do to rectify it.

It forces us to accept our reality rather than day dream about where life would be so much better and whose fault it is that we are not living ‘that life’!

As the saying going 80% of people do not care about your problems anyway, and the other 20% are glad it’s you and not them.

At the end of the day, like the dung beetle we have to be responsible for shifting our own crap, often uphill.

And like the dung beetle who uses the sun and the moon to help them move their shit in the right direction, we too can use techniques like the ‘And?’ idea, to save energy by moving us towards where we’d rather be.

Using the word ‘and?’ like the dung beetle, helps us to get on top of our shit in order to see where we need to go next.

There’s a thousand reasons why we can’t change our circumstances, and many of them are justifiable, but it’s worth checking if they are actually true by asking ourselves ‘And?’ when our excuses start flowing.