However, the response a person takes is still their response, it might not have a great outcome but it is still their choice. If someone puts a gun to your head and says, give me all your money, you can do it, or not. Still your choice. If you believe a certain fate is true, you still have the choice to test it or go against that belief. Your reaction is quite typical because of horrible circumstances, but it really doesn’t change anything, just the outcomes, but not the choices.

There has to be a middle ground between blaming other people and blaming ourselves as too much of either can cause an issue to escalate. I won’t give any specific examples but recently I have noticed how quick I am to either immediately talk back to someone who has criticised me or said something I didn’t like, or on the contrary I would soak it up like a sponge until my emotions exploded to someone who was caring enough to listen.

I have a great life, really enjoy being with a lot of the people around me, but I have a tendency to allow little things to get to me. By reading into things, you can enable others to assume power over your own personal feelings which is a load of garbage if one thinks about it properly. Why absorb and hang onto every single word that comes your way? If someone hits out at you then they have their own underlying problems, such as having a bad day at work or being discontent with an aspect of their own life. You control your emotions by taking that all important deep breath before confidently responding in a way which won’t aggravate your adversary.

I agree that we always have choice and often choose not to recognise that, for whatever reason. I’m not convinced we always have choice about what happens to us but we always have choice about how we deal with it, and react to it. Other people or circumstances never make victims out of us, we do that ourselves.

Don’t worry about contacting me here, that is cool. Until I get a contact form on this site (which obviously I need) this is your best bet. I will check out that video, I’m definitely interested and will likely watch it with a couple friends I’ve discussed Shane’s book with. Thanks for the reminder/link about it!!

Oh, and realize that this has nothing to do with your post, but I couldn’t find a “contact” link anywhere to email you. If you want you can delete it, but please don’t spam me… that’s a tough one to undo.