Focusing On What I Can Change
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Although I’m not religious, this piece of the Serenity Prayer has always spoken to me. Unfortunately, despite being so familiar with this concept, I’ve spent most of my life desperately trying to change the things I can’t change while ignoring the things I easily can. It’s like having a brick wall and a balloon in front of me and I have a safety pin, but instead of just popping the balloon I spend hours stabbing the wall with it. That whole wisdom part has taken some time to settle in I guess.
Similarly to what I wrote about in last week’s post Letting Go Of Who I Wanted To Be, acceptance is hard for me. I find that the things in life that I can’t change are always the things I want to change the most. Can you relate to that? I can’t imagine I’m the only one. I think it's really hard to choose to make the “easy” changes. By “easy” I mean actually doable. No change is easy, but I think I fool myself by focusing on what I can’t change instead of what I can. If I focus on what I can’t change then when it doesn’t work, it’s not on me. Taking on the things I can change means being accountable for the outcome. On a subconscious level, I think I run away from that pressure.
For example, I was having a problem at work where I was becoming way too stressed and it was affecting not only my work performance, but it got bad enough that it was noticeably affecting my quality of life (ring any bells?). What was the first solution I came up with? Just say yes to everything, take on more and more work, and eventually maybe I’ll find more hours in the day to get it all done. I figured it had to be a time management problem (it wasn’t, i.e. things I cannot change) so it would just work itself out eventually. At the end of last year, I hit my breaking point. I was drowning and there was no end in sight so I finally told my boss how stressed I was and that I needed something to change (having an uncomfortable conversation, i.e. things I can change). Within the first quarter of the year we removed enough from my plate that I was able to start taking on new projects and learning new parts of the business I was really interested in while staying at a reasonable level of stress and busyness.
I hope that’s as relatable an example for you as it is for me. I'm constantly reminding myself of how nice it felt to have that weight come off, and all it took was one uncomfortable conversation. Long story short, if you ask me, pop the damn balloon. I never get anywhere with the brick wall, and I doubt you will either. If this hits home for you, please share an example from your life in the comments. The more examples the better to help remind me to choose the balloon!