The 7 Areas of Life Where You Must Take Control…

Website DIVISIONS (Over 600 articles to help you to grow in every facet of your life)

Written by Jimmie Burroughs Email this article to a friend

The easiest thing to do is to complain about everything in life and do little to make changes. If you are to have a life of fulfillment, you must take control. The purpose of this article is to talk about the areas of life that you can control and must control lest they control you.  The 7 Areas of Life where you must take control:

• Creating happiness
• Resolving problems
• Helping others
• Accomplishing goals
• Building relationships
• Dealing with circumstances
• Changing our spiritual state

Creating happiness:

We create our own happiness or unhappiness. Since happiness is primarily based on happenstance, it behooves us to control the happenings that are going on around us. It is true that we don’t have 100% control but we do have the majority control. Make a list of things that make you happy and another list of things that make you unhappy.

The things on the list that make you happy are the things that you want to surround yourself with. Does reading a good book make you happy? Then be sure to always have a supply at hand for your spare time. Does playing golf or going fishing make you happy? Be sure to schedule them into your life. Are you happy when you are with your friends? Plan quality times with your friends that you enjoy being with. Beware that Television, as a rule, doesn’t make you happy and yet the typical person spends 30 hours per week watching it. Replace passive TV with active participation in things you know make you happy.

The things on the list that make you unhappy are not as easy to control but they can be improved upon. If certain people depress you, try to plan to spend as little time around them as possible. If you can’t pay your bills, and that is enough to make anyone unhappy, get some help on planning ways to begin to pay them off and learn how to stay out of debt. Take those things that make you unhappy and work on getting each one out of your life; sure it isn’t easy and yes it will take time but it is very possible and many have been able to do it.

Resolving problems:

Problems are a part of life and we will always have them. Since you can never live a problem free life, the next best thing is to bring them under control. For example, if you have a weight problem which is causing a health problem, what is causing the weight problem? Most of the time it is your diet and your inactivity that is at the root of the problem. There is an island in the South Pacific where almost everyone is overweight. There was a time when almost no one there was overweight. What caused the change? When fast food was introduced to the island people began to get overweight.

Before you say you just can’t lose weight, consider the true story of Fulton, New York’s resident Jay Wornick who set out to lose some weight when his wife bet him she could lose more than he; at the beginning he didn’t have a lot of confidence that he would be able to lose more than 30 or 40 pounds of his 360 total weight as of January of 2011. But he surprised himself when the weigh  began to come off, he just kept on working at it and now 10 months later he is down to 168 pounds from his starting place of 360.

You can connect with Jay on Facebook at his invitation:  “Thanks for the positive comments guys… if you’re positive and want to be friends on Facebook as well as see my pics before and after, add me, my name is listed as James Wornick…” More

Having a Big Mac Hamburger is not the problem; it is having them as a regular diet; it is the   wrong decisions we make each day over and over that create the problem. Habits have to be changed: Instead of living to eat, it is eating to live; living longer and living healthier.

Many of the problems we experience are of our own making so the solution is the unmaking of them. Make a list of the problems that are pressing upon you and decide what you can do to eliminate each one. Some perhaps can’t be easily eliminated and those you have to just deal with the best you can.

If you have a smoking problem, you created it and now you are responsible to rid yourself of it. Easier said than done; right, but if you want to get in control of your life, it must be done and time is of an essence on this one since it can kill you. It is best to set your goal to quit a bad habit for 30 days, “The 30 day trial”; then set it again. Forever goals are harder to keep.

Helping others:

You may wonder how helping others helps to get your life under control. It gets your mind off of yourself and your problems and focuses on helping others to resolve their problems and by doing so your problems are diminished; much of the time the problems we have are small when compared to what many are going through. Helping others is like a medicine to the soul; it gives purpose to life.

I read recently the a celebrity marriage was ending after only 72 days. The wedding cost over 17 million dollars. What a waste of money. Just consider how much that 17 million would have helped to alleviate some of the suffering around the world. Each day on the average 26,000 children die of starvation and treatable disease. You can help through: www.CompassIonInternational.com

Accomplishing goals:

Accomplishing goals is part of problem solving. For example, if your problem is debt, your goal is to get out of debt and stay out of debt. If your problem is smoking, your goal is to quit smoking. Whatever your problems may be, your goals are to overcome them. Sometimes our goal is to avoid a problem; for example, to build a solid retirement so that when retirement comes we are not going to have the problem of not being able to retire because of the lack of income.

Goals are for the purpose of overcoming problems or avoiding them.

Building relationships:

If having certain people in your life is your desire, then doing what is necessary to have them in your life is your responsibility. Complaining about having no friends is not a help; building relationships is. Building better relationships is about becoming a better person. Jim Rohn said that, “We attract success by the person we become”. That very same thing is true about building relationships; we attract friends by the person we become. If you want to have a friend, become a friend. Treat others as you would have them treat you and you will have friends.

At the end of the day it is not how successful we’ve become,  how much money we have, the kind of home or car we have but it is the relationships we have developed. The relationship we have with our family and friends is for more precious than silver or gold.

Dealing with circumstances:

It is the circumstances that we face in life that often defeat us. What is your fortune? It has to do with the overall circumstances or the condition which you face in life which includes everything that ever happens to you yesterday, today and for as long as you live. We become victims of the circumstances or victors over the circumstances. Circumstances surround every event of life. How then are we to bring them under control?

Oprah Winfrey was poor in the early years of her life; that was the circumstances that she was born into, but it would not keep her there. She was responsible to change them and change them she did. Today she is one of the richest women in the world. For some people it would have been enough to imprisoned them for the rest of their life, “a victim of circumstances”. We are responsible to deal with our circumstances.

None of my family ever went to college but I refused to carry on the same tradition. I worked and paid my way through college with my wife’s help and it was not easy. I worked a full time job and carried a full load at college. I was married and had two small children. I made it a point to never study until my children were in bed in the evening. With all that I still graduated with a 3.72 GPA with honors. Circumstances would have told me it could not be done but I refused to be a victim of circumstances and you can also.

We all have circumstances; it is how we deal with them that matters. We either become the victim or the victor and we decide which.

Changing our spiritual state:

The last is actually first. Changing our spiritual state is the first responsibility in life. It empowers us the take control of the other six areas of life. Changing your spiritual state is going from death to life. It is the only way to experience life in its fullness. It is the only way to know God and to experience his forgiveness in our life. It is the only way to become a part of his everlasting kingdom. CLICK HERE to learn how to have a relationship with God.

Conclusion:

Our life is what we make it to be. It can be unhappy or it can be happy. We can be enslaved to debt or we can be debt free. We can drown in our troubles or we can be problem solvers. We can think of ourselves only or we can help others. We can set goals and accomplish them or we can drift through life and never accomplish anything. We can have friends or live a life of loneliness. We can be victims of circumstances or we can be victors. We can live our life without God or we can have his help and his presence in our life. These are the 7 Areas of Life where you must take control and if you don’t, no one else will ever do it for you.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“With patience and ease, in an unselfish and purposeful way, over a time period undetermined, and for a good that includes others, I intend for $1,000,000 to come to me and to others who join me in holding to this objective.” Jimmie Burroughs

Ads by Google

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To subscribe to blog simply click on the RSS button on the left, and copy and paste the URL of our RSS feed into your RSS reader. ARTICLE INDEX _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ FREE Reproduction Rights – Feel free to publish this article on your website as long as the following information is included at the end of the article:

Jimmie Burroughs is the author of JimmieBurroughs.com ; get more tips on personal development: www.JimmieBurroughs.com

JimmieBurroughs.com is founded and maintained by Jimmie Burroughs Nashville, Tennessee. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2011 Jimmie Burroughs. All rights reserved