When we start our lives, we are all about surviving. It is not even something we learn. It is an instinct embedded into us. The thing is: as we grow and surviving really happens passively, we are at risk of starting to drift. Since our survival is ensured, there really is no reason to improve. There is no reason to struggle hard and we simply drift through life.

There is nothing wrong with taking a break and enjoying one’s life for a bit. Everyone needs that. But if we stop having a vision, a goal to work towards, we will slowly but surely end up loosing our purpose. And when there is no purpose why would we get out of bed in the morning? Why would we leave this perfectly cuddly world that is so kind to us? It makes me feel depressed. And I end up feeling more dead than alive. When we are at this point is it high time we do something about our lethargy.

The first step is to find inspiration. It is about what we enjoy. It is about listening to podcasts, reading books and watching You Tube videos to figure out what it is we want. Or at least in what direction we want to go. We need to figure out, what makes us happy. We need to envision the life, we would love to live. The kind of life, that would have us be excited to get out of bed at 8am rather than at noon.

But inspiration is not enough. It is very nice to know what we want and then just go off and drift in the comfort of our lives some more. There are many reasons for this. Fear of failure, laziness and a sense of pointlessness to name just a few. Overcoming these is very difficult and every human being struggles. But there is no point in giving in to those obstacles. Because every day that we spend sleeping until 11am has us feeling a little bit worse about ourselves and makes it more difficult for us to actually be able to achieve our goals.

Truth is: we need to take ownership. When we get inspired, we are all motivated and want to go get whatever is the cause of our inspiration, but that only applies while we are in some sort of fantasy about our own lives. The moment we come back to reality, we fall back into our comfort. And this is where we need to be doing some work. We need to take ownership of our lives. We are the only ones living our lives. Which means we are the only one’s in charge. No one will ever do anything to improve our lives for us. No one can. There is this very powerful realization, that we are alone. No one cares. Yes, this can be incredibly devastating. If no one cares, why would I get out of bed? It doesn’t matter. Well… no one cares except us. It doesn’t matter except to ourselves. Yes, if we don’t get to achieve what we wanted to achieve, no one will care, but us. And this is powerful. It means that the relationship we have to ourselves and our lives is crucial. It means that the only person who we ever have to ask forgiveness of is ourselves.

And there is another big misunderstanding: to achieve our goals and take ownership, we need to get out of bed and off our butts. But other than that there does not need to be grand changes. Changing and adjusting our routines little by little will have a major positive impact on our lives. It is mostly the mindset that needs to be changed fundamentally. We need to adjust our mindset to be focused on owning our lives. We need to monitor our thinking. And this is important. The things we think is like talking to ourselves and if we say something often enough we will end up believing it. That can be very powerful if we control the way we talk to ourselves.

More often than not however we are blissfully unaware of what we are thinking at any given moment. There are a few things that can help. One of them is having a conversation with ourselves about what we think and how we feel. No one needs to know other than us. We need to be brutally honest with ourselves. And if we feel like a complete failure, maybe we can redirect our attention to the things that we haven’t failed, or even better find a way to improve. One more very effective way to monitor what we think is journalling. This can be in the form of regular check-ins with ourselves, or just random journalling about anything that is on our minds.

We need to ban negativity from our minds, that often comes in the form of perfectionism or realism and it causes a lot of stress which in turn costs us a lot of energy and has as drift into lethargy which is not what we want. We want to be inspired and take ownership. Never forget that we need regular boosts of inspiration, otherwise we might forget, why we are striving to build a certain life every day. Ownership of our thoughts, our mindset, our habits our daily actions. Ownership of our lives. Living and surviving are two different things. One is inspired and full of deliberation and happiness. The other is purposeless. It is up to us to choose. Only us.