Let’s say you’re driving cross-country, New York to California, and you are smack dab in the middle of . . . let’s go with Kansas. You’re on this straight and lonely road with very little traffic and not much to see other than fencing and tumbleweeds. In fact, you can’t remember the last car you’ve passed, and you haven’t had a cell signal in at least an hour.
Right then, in the middle of the state, a warning light pops up on your dashboard. Ping.
Because there aren’t many options to pull over, you ignore it and just keep the car pointing west.
But then another warning light flashes on. Then another. And then you hear a clanging sound under the hood and black smoke comes billowing out of the exhaust. But that’s not the bad part. The bad part is that you realize, right at that moment, that you forgot to get gas at the last rest stop and now you are running dangerously low.
Just as you are ready to go into a full-blown panic, wait . . . what’s that? Way up ahead, you see a sign for a service station just a few miles farther on. And you can see from the sign that this is one of those actual service stations, a place that not only fills your tank but also sells tires and repairs engines.
You grip the steering wheel tightly, keep your eye on the horizon, and two miles later, leaving a cloud of deep black smoke behind you, you coast into the service station mere seconds before the car runs out of gas.
You made it.
All right!
Then, you fill the car with gas and head back out onto the road.
Without. Fixing. Anything. Else.
The car is clanging and shooting smoke everywhere and yet you get back on the road with a full tank of gas and a smile on your face.
That is exactly what I do every time I want to make major changes in my life. I get excited. I fill the tank with goals and ambitions and plans and positive thoughts and then I drive the car with smoke shooting out of it, the engine clanging, the steering wheel shaking, and I’m completely surprised when I get stranded a few miles down the road and don’t get to that financial location, or fitness location, or career location, or personal growth location that I’m shooting for.
I never, ever get there, but I head out optimistically, every single time, with a vehicle that is spitting and sputtering and leaving me covered with smoke and oil. The thing is, I have been driving with all those smoking parts and broken hoses for so long that I don’t even notice them anymore. At first, I tried just wishing them away, ignoring them, hoping that when I got to the first rest stop, when I achieved a little success in one area, it would just, you know, magically replace all the faulty parts in the others.
But now I realize that If I’m even going to make it to the first rest stop, I need to fix and patch and replace every one of the broken pieces and rewire it all. I need to be able to make a living in a field that I’m actually good at and can take some pride in. I need to be healthy. I need to get my finances under control and not be addicted to my cell phone, worried that a bad email is coming in or I screwed up in some way. I need to be confident in what I do and excited about it. I need to enjoy life and make a difference to those around me.
I have programmed myself to be right where I am. I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t the plan. But every fear, every worry, every pain point in my life has led to another line of code being secretly written to reduce the pain that I perceive I feel. And with each individual alarm, warning, electric fence, shock collar, all of which were intended to keep me safe, the world became smaller, since I was forbidding myself from going past them.
It’s like when we set our GPS for the address of a restaurant we’ve never been to and we follow the directions blindly and when the GPS chirps, “You have reached your destination on your left,” we’re excited. Then we look out and see that we’re not at a restaurant but in the middle of a cornfield. We stop and say, “Hey, this isn’t right.”
The problem is, in life, we never get to that cornfield. We just keep following our emotional GPS. If it says go right, we go right for years and years and years, whether it’s taking us where we want to go or not.
The irony is, we are the ones who programmed the car’s GPS. We went into the advanced screen and added a few rules. Yes, take us to the restaurant, but only use roads that we’ve been on before. No new roads. Don’t take us on any routes that are frightening or risky; don’t allow us to worry about getting there. Don’t take any toll roads, and don’t take any routes that could get us stuck. We are the ones who set and alter the lines of code in our life. We have told our mind which areas to skip, to avoid, to run from, and what to reward us with.
We press the GPS button and start the car and drive. Around and around we go. We can’t go on that new career road because we’ve never been on it before, and we can’t go on this one because it’s a dirt road. So, we drive around some more, feeling optimistic because we’re moving but confused about why we never seem to arrive.
If I were to make any significant changes in my life, I need to go one level deeper than I have ever gone before. Instead of replacing parts, focusing on areas in my life that are weak, I need to turn off all my alarms and electric fences, by learning why I set them. I need to reprogram myself, to look at all the codes that govern me, warn me, and restrict me.
For me, I feel out of control in almost every area of my life. I feel I have no influence or choice. I am the passenger. I am the baggage. I’m just along for the ride.
This means that the way I currently have myself wired, I am completely responsible for everything I do, touch, or see, but I have absolutely no control over any of it.
Well, that sucks.
All the bad things are my fault, and any good things were just dumb luck that happened while I was being forced to do something else.
So, I need to reprogram the crap out of me.