When I was young and I’d ask my Mom how to do something and she responded with an option or two which I often rebutted with excuses or reason as to why I couldn’t make that thing happen, she would just say…

‘Bud, (my Mom calls me bud) where there’s a will, there’s a way.’

I’m honestly not even sure if she was aware of how big of an impact that statement had on me, but it was super empowering because she was essentially saying, ‘if you want something bad enough, you’ll find a way to get it.’

I think this lesson really took hold for two primary reasons…

One, it’s implied that if I want something enough I can in fact get it, and then on the contrary if I didn’t get what I wanted I most likely didn’t want it enough. In both circumstances it puts the ball in my court and insinuates that it’s up to me, I liked that feeling!

Now she could have said something like, ‘Well that’s just what happens sometimes’ or ‘That’s how the cookie crumbles’…there are a million and one sayings like this, but she didn’t.

I recently came across a quote by Roger Kipling that sums this concept up really nicely I think…

‘If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or you tried to bargain over the price.’

I believe that this whole conversation can sort of be boiled down to one really important question and that question is, do you think that life happens for you or to you?

You might be thinking, why would someone want to believe that their life is happening to them or essentially that it’s not up to them, it’s up to outside circumstance…the reason is that there’s a massive payoff in the outlook that life happens to you.

The payoff is lack of responsibility.

If you believe that most things are out of your control, you don’t have to take responsibility for much of anything.

Oh you know ‘I was late because there was so much traffic on the highway and everything was backed up…’

‘I couldn’t eat a healthful meal because I didn’t think ‘x’ activity was going to take that long and so I just had to run through a drive through…’

Typically the thing that takes the brunt of the blame in life in general is time. Secondly is probably money, but time is no doubt number one…but I digress because that’s a whole nother podcast in itself.

Back to responsibility, so let’s say someone was on a huge ‘take responsibility kick,’ their language would differ a lot in the traffic and healthful eating examples, they might say…

‘I was late because I didn’t make enough time.’

Simple.

Or, ‘I ran through the drive through because I didn’t prepare ahead.’

In saying, ‘I didn’t make enough time to account for traffic, my fault’ not only empowers you, it’s also typically a better experience for the person you’re explaining to as well because they don’t see you making excuses. They see you owning the fact that you didn’t manage time your time properly and therefore, they feel better too because they feel ‘seen’ and understood.

Now this doesn’t work if you’re just late every single time and you’re like, ‘I didn’t allow enough time, my baaad’…that’s a different story, but owning your actions benefits you and the other because honestly people can sniff out excuses super easily, I think we’ve all got that ability!

So circling back around to my Mom’s saying, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’ is basically an ultimate personal responsibility and accountability concept.

There is a huge trade-off to be made here because as soon as you agree to take full responsibility, you’ve got to take responsibility for everything in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly, all of it, and I can say from experience that I don’t always like what I see.

I’ll give you a personal example…

I was in Colombia for a few months and wow, the Colombians are so kind, welcoming and friendly. I then made a move to Mexico and I was finding that folks weren’t quite as friendly as they were in Colombia…now maybe that’s true to some degree or maybe not, cultures differ of course.

But…I noticed I was telling myself that folks weren’t as friendly in Mexico and possibly even creating that dynamic, so when I really took a step back thought about it, I came to the conclusion that maybe it’s more me than anything, so I did a little experiment…

The next day I went out and just saw how many people I could smile at or say hi to in the street when I was walking around and shocker, all of sudden folks were a lot more friendly. I was just projecting my own experience onto other folks and saying it was their fault that I wasn’t feeling very connected vs. taking a look at myself first.

What I am doing, how am I creating this and how can I shift it?

Since I altered my perspective and took that responsibility on myself, I’ve noticed a huge change and all of sudden I’m connecting with folks a lot more and it’s super empowering because while I can’t control other people, I have full control over myself, so again it puts the ball in my court and I like that.

Also I find a helpful way to think about all this stuff is by asking, ‘Who or what is the common denominator?’

We’ve all heard this a million…‘I keep attracting these guys that aren’t emotionally available’ or, ‘Why do I feel smothered by all women that I meet.’ 

Who’s the common denominator?

I’ve had the experience too many times to count where aspects of relationships with women are almost identical to one another, but the person is different so that’s when I need to ask myself, ‘What’s the same?’

The answer is ME meaning, what am I doing or how am I being to attract this because I’m the consistent input here. Every part of the ‘equation’ is changing, except for ME!

I want to mention that I fully acknowledge the fact that outside circumstances do exist of course, our environment has a huge impact on us and life happens but, once we reach say 16, 17 or 18 no one can really make us do anything that we don’t want to do. 

We’re fully able to get jobs and make some money at 17 years old. Your parents couldn’t make you show up to school, so you could drop out and essentially there’s nothing they could about it because you’re at a point where you’re self-sufficient enough that you can take care of your basic needs i.e. food, shelter and water.

This reminds me of one more quote that a mentor of mine shared with me years ago (I’m full quotes today). I was probably complaining or something and she said to me…

‘Marcus you know, you want exactly what you have, and you have exactly what you want.’

At first in my head I was like, ‘BULLSHIIIT I have all sorts of things in my life that I don’t want. I want better relationships, I want to be happier, I want this I want that’ and it took me years to fully grasp what she was really saying and once I got it, I realized it was true.

I’ll give you an example…

Let’s say you have a family gathering to go to and you really don’t want to go and you’re telling yourself, ‘fuuuck I don’t want to go to this, I just want to stay home’ but you decide to go and you might tell yourself how you didn’t want to do it but you did for x, y and z reason.

The truth is you did want to go, but it may not be for x, y and z reason, it may be because the potential repercussions of not going to that family event were worse in your mind than actually going. So perhaps you didn’t want to deal with backlash from your family, potentially the uncomfortable conversations explaining why you didn’t show up etc.

So when we make decisions we always do what we want to do and it may not always seem that way, but if we take a step back and be really honest with ourselves…it’s the truth.

I’ll give you another example, I was talking with a girl I had met in Colombia and she was renting a room from a women in Medellin and she mentioned how much she didn’t like where she was staying and how she wanted to leave…so I asked her, “If you want to leave how come you don’t?’

She said well, ‘I’m such a people pleaser and I don’t want to hurt my hosts’ feelings’ so I said to her, ‘Well if you really wanted to leave you would right, so what do you not want to do more than leave your place?’

I asked her, ‘What does it feel like to think about having that conversation with your host and telling her that you’re leaving to go to a different apartment?’

She said, ‘Oh my god, I’d feel so bad, it would be super uncomfortable!!’

What she had told herself was that she was a people pleaser and she didn’t want to swap places because she didn’t want to make her host quote on quote ‘feel bad.’

But the truth was, what she really didn’t want to do was have that conversation and potentially feel uncomfortable and face possible disappointment from her host or whatever she thought she might feel. So this ‘people pleaser’ concept can be a really sneaky trick that the mind plays in order to justify decisions or avoid confrontation in this case.

Her primary consideration wasn’t actually her hosts feelings, they were her own. She cared most about what that situation would have brought up for her personally and she decided to stay in the apartment because she’d prefer to ride it out than have that conversation and have those feelings come up. It’s not good or bad, it’s just what is.

It was actually really cool having this convo with her because we sort of figured it out together and afterwards she felt better about the decision she was making.

The responsibility thing is big because it’s freeing, she felt more free knowing that she was making the decision she ultimately wanted to make vs. telling herself ‘I’m a people pleaser,’ because with the people pleaser mindset you’re choosing to be at the whim of other folks which isn’t even possible in a situation like this.

Also, thinking that you’re making the decision for someone else can breed resentment for the other, which is 100% of your own making. You might start to treat this person with a little bit less care for no apparent reason that they’re aware of!

With the responsibility mindset you OWN your feelings and your decisions.

Now from the outside you can’t tell a difference because the result of the situation is the same i.e. staying in the house, but the intent behind it is drastically different and the responsibility angle leaves a better taste in your mouth because you take your power back vs. telling yourself the people pleaser story where you give your power away.

When it comes to food folks do this all the time, ‘Well I ate x, y or z because someone offered me the food and I didn’t want to be rude.’ Now in specific circumstances I’ve done this exact same thing but, it wasn’t really about being rude necessarily, it was because I didn’t want to deal with the potential uncomfortable feelings, situation or awkwardness that skipping that food would have brought up for me…because on the contrary if someone offered me peanuts and hypothetically I was highly allergic, I wouldn’t have any issue saying no because being ‘polite’ in a situation like that might actually land me in the hospital.

So, it’s important to be honest with yourself and own your decisions, not because they’re good or bad, but because YOU made them! It’s not due to some inherent people pleaser trait you have, or because someone might be disappointed or get mad at you…it might actually be just how much you hate conflict or the potential possibility of an uncomfortable situation.

I hope this whole concept of ‘wanting what you have and having what you want’ makes sense because in my mind it totally ties in with what my Mom taught me about getting what you want and when you have the will to get, you’ll find a way.

This is something I’m continuously working on, I’m definitely not sitting here saying I’ve fully figured this out, but I am implementing this practice because when I see something in my life that I don’t like…firstly, I acknowledge that I want it and if I don’t want it anymore I need to make changes in order to shift it. Now, if I don’t make those necessary changes, I have to acknowledge and be honest with myself about the fact that I didn’t truly want it.

Also, just putting this article together has really helped me engrain these ideas in my mind and the better I understand this stuff the more effectively I can share it with you. I’m definitely not sitting here finger wagging, I just want to explain this concept to you because I’ve found it so valuable in my own life and I hope you find the same.

Lastly, I think that one of the biggest benefits of implementing this perspective is that it actually eliminates a fair bit of suffering. It’s also super empowering because realizing that you have exactly what you want means by definition if ya don’t like what ya have, you can go after something else!