Answering the "Why Me?" Question

I'm sure that all of us at some time or other ask ourselves the question, "Why Me?" in response to some event or situation. There is a certain undertone to that question; it suggests an air of victimisation and generally speaking, that is not a good place to be coming from. Most personal development writings will say that you tend to get more of what you focus on and if you think of yourself as a victim, you will continue to be one.

Tony Robbins, one of my favourite authors, likes to talk about questions a lot. In his book, "Awaken the Giant Within", he has a whole chapter dedicated to the Power of Questions. Have you ever noticed that when you ask yourself a question, your brain tends to come up with answers, even if not directly - you think of thoughts and memories which give you answers.

Here's an example: Suppose you want to lose some excess flab and you do the traditional thing and start some kind of diet and take up some exercise. However you don't stick to it for too long and you start to ask yourself the question "Why can't I ever stick with it?" and you might start to remember times in the past where you have tried and failed and this might trigger you to think "...because I am weak willed", or perhaps "I'm just no good at diets", or maybe even "I was just born to be fat" and so on.

So, the "Why Me" question can be a very dangerous one because if you ask it coming from a place where you see yourself as a victim, your brain will come up with ways to verify that thought and before you know it you'll have a whole bunch of reasons why this has happened to YOU, why life is so unfair, why you never get the breaks and so on.

Last week, I caught myself doing this. I received a massive financial blow which has dropped my income by a huge amount and slapped me with a large debt. I've been employed for almost a year and yet I am struggling. I am an intelligent, well educated person working as a software engineer. I am thirty five years old, and here I am, still struggling just to make ends meet. And then there came the question... "Why Me? Why am I still struggling? I should be doing better than this by now. I have every reason to be successful, why am I still failing?".

For an hour or so I wallowed a little bit but luckily I soon snapped out of it. Then I decided to try and answer my questions, but from the point of view of an independent observer rather than as a victim. I found answers.

One of the reasons I am struggling financially is because I was sensible when I bought my house and took out a 15 year mortgage rather than a 25 year one. I am paying now in order to save massively later on. Another reason is that the fees for my sons nursery are astronomical. But this is simply a fact of life. I knew I would have to pay the fees and that is that. It is also not permanent. In two years time he will be at school and a big burden will be lifted.

Job wise, I simply don't earn very much and that's because I only recently re-entered the job market. If I had been working in the industry for the last seven years like my partner, I would probably be earning a lot more by now. Business wise, I have no other income simply because I have not started any other business endeavours yet. So there you have it. I have answered my question and got practical answers back. I no longer feel like a victim and furthermore, because I have identified the true reasons behind my predicament I have a pretty good idea of the kinds of action I could take to rectify it:

• Lengthen the term of my mortgage, get the cash but prolong the debt
  
• Work hard at my job, build my career and go for a higher salary
• Start a part time business

I choose the last option.

Very often, when a situation comes up that causes us to ask the question "Why Me?", what starts as something fairly specific can end up being generalised and this too can be very dangerous. For example, imagine the following potential internal dialogue:

"Why am I still struggling financially at my age?"
"I have always struggled, will it ever change? Am I doomed always to be poor?"
"I never get anything I want, why do I always fail?"
"Why am I such a failure?"

If you ever hear a little voice in your head having a conversation like the one above, STOP RIGHT THERE! Snap out f it, stop being a victim, don't do that to yourself. Instead, imagine you are an outside observer. Re-evaluate your original question and see if you can find an honest answer without the emotional baggage that's usually attached to it.

It can be a valuable learning experience to answer your "Why me?" questions, but only when you approach them with the right frame of mind.

One Month Challenge - Another Failure!

After failing my challenge after only one day I decided to use a nifty web tool called Joe's Goals to keep track of my progress. My challenge was tough but I was able to stick to it for an entire week. Then it all fell apart on Monday...

Monday is one of the toughest days because I have karate in the evening so its very difficult to find the time to squeeze everything in. My plan was to get into work at 8am and doing an hour of development before starting work and to read after karate. I go to the gym at lunch times to do weight training and I did not want to miss out on that.

Over the weekend, I had made a discovery about my running ability which made me want to start it up again to prepare for a 5k Race for Life that I have signed up for in July. Something I desperately wanted to do was to plot out a new running route using another groovy web tool - GMaps Pedometer. I didn't get a chance to do this over the weekend, and I wanted to go for a run on a new route Tuesday morning so I had to do it sometime on Monday.

Here, once again I made exactly the same mistake as I did the first time I failed. I decided to make the route first thing and this took about 20 minutes so I only had around 40 minutes to do my development. Not a big deal you might think but a challenge is a challenge and mine is to do one hour a day so I would have to catch up later. I figured I could squeeze it in after karate.

Unfortunately that plan all went to pot. About half way through the karate class I started feeling ill. I was getting dizzy, shaky and I started to ache in a weird way - not in the way your muscles ache after a workout, but like you have the flu. When I got home I was feeling really bad and it was all I could do to get myself into the shower and into bed. The next day I was feeling just as bad and I phoned in sick to work.

Now you could say that being ill is a valid excuse and perhaps that's true but really I failed the challenge at 8am when I was feeling fine. I should have done the development and left the route planning until later. That wouldn't have got done but it wouldn't have mattered as I was in no condition to go running Tuesday morning anyway.

I'm still sick so I've done no exercise since. I've tried to do development but I really don't feel up to it so the challenge is on hold until I feel better.

Lesson learned: For the second time now, do not put off the important things! Don't assume you can catch up later. All we ever have is right now, this moment. Always do what is most important in that moment.

30 Day Challenge - Failure at the first hurdle!

The 30 day challenge that I set for myself was due to start Friday June 1st. I failed it the very next day! Before starting the challenge I had spent some time figuring out exactly how I was going to achieve it; this was mainly a matter of time management.

Weekends are a danger area because things just happen to crop up. Very often I have good intentions to do something but life gets in the way and those good intentions go flying out of the window. So I figured that in order to meet my challenge on the weekends when I don't have a set routine to guide me, the only way I would be able to do it would be if I were to get everything done first thing.

However I can't do that on Saturdays as I have another commitment - I do my weekly grocery shop on Saturday mornings. I like to do this early to avoid the Saturday crowds. So my compromise for Saturday was to do everything except the reading then go shopping at 9am and read afterwards.

Unfortunately, it all went a bit wonky! In order to do my grocery shop I need my shopping list which is built from a food plan that I build earlier in the week. I was running late, trying to rush it at the last minute and I figured I could just quickly finish it off in the morning. Big Mistake. I won't bore you with the details but I ended up wasting an hour and putting myself way behind. I didn't want to be too late hitting the shops so I figured I'd just get that over with and I'd still have the rest of the day to fit in my development work. Yeah right ;-)

By the time I got back from the shops my partner was up and about and ready to start the weekend and had an agenda for me. Things just kept cropping up, I kept pushing back the development and it simply didn't get done.

This is irritating but its also valuable because I have learned a lesson, well two in fact. They are:

1) Plan ahead, don't leave things to the last minute.
2) Always do the most important things first, don't put them off.

So, what now? My challenge is still very important to me so I am going to start afresh from today. To make it easier to manage the dates, I'm going to rename it to simply a "One Month Challenge" so my new end date will be 2nd July.