“I Have Life Circumstances that Are Ruining Everything”

I want you to close your eyes and think about something that’s happened in your life. Maybe it’s something you wish hadn’t happened. Do you believe that the circumstance was the problem?

When I was in college, I played softball and was pre-med. And I was absolutely miserable. I didn’t get along with my coach. I felt alone and isolated. I just wanted to quit. And my dad did not want me to. He wanted to show me that walking away wasn’t always the answer. So I blamed my dad, and I blamed the college: everything but myself. I didn’t take ownership of what was happening. I thought it was happening to me and I had no control over it. I thought my circumstance was making me depressed. 

But the circumstance doesn’t actually make us feel a certain way. Being at the university and playing softball wasn’t making me feel depressed. It was my thoughts about the circumstance. 

The Thought Model

See, this is how it works. We have a circumstance, which can be a person, a place, a thing. The circumstance is what we have thoughts about. It’s these thoughts that create our feelings. Our feelings drive our actions and then our actions get us our results. 

So let’s say a circumstance is my goldfish passing away. It makes me feel a bit guilty, and I think that I didn’t feed the fish, so this is my fault. Out of guilt, I think of all the things I could have done differently, all the times I forgot to feed the fish, and I forget about all the good things I did. Ultimately, the result is that I’ll believe that I’m the reason for my fish’s death. 

If you’re not educated in the thought model, you’d think I was feeling guilty because the fish is belly-up. But, that’s not it. I feel guilty because I thought I caused it. 

Identifying the Circumstance

Let’s say you have a job. At this job, you feel like you’re being picked on a lot, possibly bullied. You don’t feel like you have a lot of strong connections. They’re asking you to work longer hours and you haven’t gotten your paycheck in a month. A lot of the time, my clients would describe this circumstance as “my job is toxic.”

But the circumstance is just that you have a job. You get to think whatever you want about the job. But those thoughts are what will lead to your result. Thoughts like, “I’m not fitting in,” “I’m isolated,” “I’m being asked to do more than I should be.” 

The reason why we spiral when we have a heated situation is that we’re generating hundreds of thousands of thoughts about it. And you can’t run through a thought model about each of them. 

But you can start by picking one. Let’s say you choose the thought “I am being asked to do more than I should be.” The feeling is probably frustration or disrespect. So what actions would you potentially take as a result of these feelings?

Most likely, you’ll do a lot of venting. You’ll think about leaving your job but you won’t. And, ultimately, you’ll make zero changes because you’re staying in that place of thinking these things are happening to you. 

But you can be in control of your emotions and thoughts. The only step you have to take to do so is understanding what a circumstance truly is. 

Changing the Circumstance

We all want to change the circumstance. We think it’ll make everything get better automatically. Does it? Well, let’s take a look at an example. 

When I was in full-time clinical medicine, I was away from my family a lot and doing a lot of 24-hours shifts.

Circumstance: full-time clinical neonatology 

Thought: “I am away from my family too much.”

Feeling: sadness

Actions: blaming the job, venting, complaining about choosing the wrong profession 

Result: I believed my job made me really sad. 

Then an opportunity presented itself for me to be a national medical director at a company. I could work from home. The pay was better. I had a set schedule, no weekends, no holidays. It sounded pretty amazing. So what did I do? I changed the circumstance. 

Suddenly, I was working from home. I was seeing my family all the time, but I wasn’t spending time with them. The nanny was. So I had a lot of thoughts. “Why do I have to work? This job is taking over. Now I’m working until 8 at night.”

I wasn’t able to accept that these were all thoughts about my circumstance; I wanted to change my circumstance. I spun on that hamster wheel for years.

It wasn’t until learned about life coaching that I understood this was about me, not any of those jobs. And I had the ability to decide how it would go. The answer wasn’t continuing to switch my circumstances. I had to accept where I was - that my reality was all on me - to attain the clarity to understand when to change my circumstance again and become a life coach. But I never ran away from a circumstance again. 

Limiting Beliefs

Do you have a circumstance that you keep trying to change? The answer is not to change it. It’s to change your thoughts about it. If you’re not willing to, it just means you’re not ready. You have to take the time to break down some of the limiting beliefs that may have been ingrained in you since you were a little kid.

Growing up, I saw my parents a lot.  I had the belief that a good mom is home all the time with her kids, because that’s what I saw. This is what led me to think that my job was making it impossible for me to be a good mom. 

If we’re willing to do it, tracing back your limiting beliefs can give you greater awareness of yourself to be able to start creating new beliefs. If you have the same thoughts coming up over and over, there may be a limiting belief at the root. See how far you can go back. Where did your thoughts originate? That awareness will take the power away from your limiting beliefs. 

Today, I want you to realize you are in complete control of your life. You can have any result you want. If there’s a circumstance that you believe is causing a huge problem, go a step further. Evaluate your thoughts. It will change everything for you. 

Writer’s Note: In order to keep this to about 1100 words, I had to cut out the thought model example about relationships as well as several other sections such as the explanation of emotional childhood and adulthood, more detail about the college example in the opening, and more detail about the different jobs Dr. Novitsky tried before life coaching.