Which is more compelling:  what’s right with your life, or what’s going wrong? 

For most of us (almost all, in fact) what goes right in life sort of fades into the background.  What often stands out more often is what’s going wrong.

The Law of Attraction offers that what we focus on manifests more of the same.  Restated, we tend to perform just about as well (or as poorly) as we expect we will.

Thomas Leonard, the founder of modern life-coaching, offered that “People do what they do because they have nothing more compelling to do.”  For many, struggle is what most is compelling. 

 “Make things harder on myself than they need to be!?”, most people cry, “I’m just struggling trying to get ahead!”  But, ah!  There’s that word again:  struggle.

Are you addicted to struggle?

An addiction is defined of as “uncontrolled and compulsively engaging in an activity.”  Don’t deny the addictive nature of struggle:  Where else BUT by setting up struggle in your life can you:

• Get the opportunity to get a repetitive flood of dopamine, a small “high”, from each small “win”
• FEEL like you’re getting ahead by overcoming the struggle you set up (ESPECIALLY if the struggles were unconsciously but purposefully set up to be easily defeated and even if long-term measures say you’re stuck in your life)
• Prove (and reprove) your competence
• Justify it when you don’t succeed (“look at all I have to overcome”, “see how hard it is to get ahead”, “you’d be struggling too if you had to overcome all I have to”)
• Get attention from friends and family (“you think YOU have it hard…”, “poor guy… he’s had such a hard time of it…”

Many of us wouldn’t want to admit it, but isn’t a life in which everything goes smoothly just kind of boring!?  Isn’t it much more compelling to strive, to struggle, to overcome adversity!?  We get it all that and more by setting up struggle: the depression of struggle, followed by the high of success, THEN get to repeat it all again tomorrow.

HOW do you make things harder than they need to be?  It can happen easily, even in the most intelligent, mature and enlightened of us:

• By insisting that if you’re going to change your life it has to be large or else it doesn’t count (or you won’t do it)
• By insisting that you HAVE all the answers
• By insisting that you’ll have to know all the answers before you’ll start
• By complaining, associating with other complainers or otherwise focusing on the “struggle”
• By forcing yourself to do it the hard way (e.g. not taking alternative routes, insisting that success will only be accomplished by the ONE route you’ve locked your focus on)
• By not just taking steps and opportunities as they’re presented, instead insisting that you won’t move until the step YOU want comes
• By mentally making it harder than it needs to be (focusing on fears, lying to oneself, catastrophizing, black and white thinking, and others errors in reasoning)
• By insisting that you’ll have to do it yourself (“I don’t work well with others”, “If you want it done right…”)
• By focusing on organization (busy work) to the exclusion of just moving forward

Are you REALLY moving forward in your life or are you just feeding your addiction?

If you want to achieve success without struggle, you’ll need to find reasons more compelling than those driving your current actions.

Life brings enough challenges with it, all on it’s own.  You don’t need to feed your addiction to struggle to get ahead.  “Change is inevitable,” goes the saying, “Struggle is optional.”

Experience the symptoms of withdrawal from the “drug” struggle.  How can you make your chosen success – perhaps even with life being  “okay” and without crisis —  more compelling than living a life of perseverance?

Join me here in the Life Success Engine Forum and tell me how you’re breaking YOUR addiction to struggling to succeed!