Far too often, many of us can end up feeling as though we don’t really have the level of agency in our lives that we really want to. It’s easy to feel like you’re just being carried along on a conveyor belt through your life, never really making any genuine choices and just letting your life happen to you instead of taking charge of it.
This can lead many of us to wake up one day feeling frustrated and unhappy. This is an incredibly common symptom of letting other people dictate the way that your life is lived. If you want to finally break out of that kind of cycle, here are just a few ways to stop letting other people dictate your life.
1. Reject toxicity
One of the hardest things to come to terms with when you’re trying to take control of your life is that there are plenty of people in it who may well not be treating you half as well as you deserve. Whether it’s a partner who doesn’t appreciate you or friends who end up making you feel awful about yourself more often than not, being able to walk away from that kind of toxicity is one of the best first steps that you can take.
Sure, it’s never easy and there’s always value in trying to repair relationships. However, if that’s not really an option, you have to do what’s right for you and just walk away.
2. Don’t tolerate injustice
Of course, being treated unfairly by the people in your personal life is one thing, it’s entirely another when you’re being treated poorly by those in the other aspects of your life. Things like suffering from a break-in or a car accident with someone driving dangerously are disruptions to your life that weren’t at all your fault. Because of that, talking to people like injury lawyers and the right authorities is always a good idea. Letting injustices against yourself slide is one of the best ways to make yourself feel like you don’t really have all that much value.
3. Take control of your actions
A lot of the time the reality is that your life feels out of your hands because you’ve allowed it to be that way. Far too often many of us treat our lives like something that just happens to us. Then, when things don’t work out the way we wanted, we act like life isn’t fair.
The truth is that if you want your life to be a certain way then the only thing that you can do is to get out and make it that way yourself!
Of course, this isn’t to say that you’re supposed to just throw away any support from other people. No one is an island and we all need those around us to take care of us and support us when we need it. It’s just a matter of being able to understand the difference between allowing people into our lives and allowing people to take total control over our lives.
