I am Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits.
When building a profitable practice, we can lose control over our lives and often forget how it happened in the first place. Change is inevitable and it’s not always positive. That means you might slowly relinquish power in some aspect of your life without realizing there’s a problem until it’s too late. How did you lose control? Your friend tells you about a fun new social media website. It’s exploding in popularity, all the cool people hanging out there. You’ve never been much of an internet junkie, but you decided to take a look. You sign up, chat with a few friends and log off after 10 or 15 minutes. The following day, a couple of your colleagues at work mentioned seeing you on the website. You think that’s pretty neat. When you get home after work, you instantly log on. Before you know it, an hour has passed. You scold yourself for spending so much time online and quickly shut off your computer.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and you spend as much as two or three hours online daily. That can become a problem if other areas of your life suffer because of it. You didn’t plan on letting some social media hangouts take
control of your free time in your mind. But that’s what happened. The change was so slow and gradual that you didn’t see a problem developing. That’s just one example of a person that lets socializing get out of hand.
Too much screen time isn’t good for your mental health. It can also wreck your vision and get in the way of your responsibilities. You didn’t consciously tell yourself that you wanted to fritter away so much time. There wasn’t a decision where you told yourself, ‘I’m going to overlook commitments that I really should be handling and instead spend 15 or 20 hours every week watching videos of playful puppies and looking at pictures of what my friends ate for lunch.’ It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes losing control is slow and methodical. It sneaks up on you. The Internet can be insidious in that regard.
Let’s look at a few other common reasons people lose control of their lives:
They don’t write down and review their core values regularly.
If you don’t remind yourself constantly of who you are and what you want out of life, you may find yourself aimlessly drifting wherever outside influences and circumstances dictate. Addiction can take control of anyone, man or woman, young or old.
You accept good enough as good enough.
Maybe you don’t like your job. We talked about this this in another blog. Perhaps your important relationships are okay, but not great. Your health could be better, but you’re healthier than many people. These are situations where you lose control to complacency. You will never live your best possible life if you accept good enough as good enough.
Do you value money over experiences and friendships? You may have handed control of your life over to the almighty dollar. Are you a procrastinator? procrastination is an almost guaranteed way to lose control of many different aspects of your life. Tomorrow never comes. If you’re constantly putting things off, you’re not taking control. You’re allowing laziness, a dislike of having to perform some task, or some other reason to control your time and how you spend it. Comparing yourself to others is a no-win proposition. You can never be anyone but the person you truly are — a unique and wonderful individual.
You’re always running late.
This can be the result of a lack of a game plan. When you take control, you write out a plan of action for every day. Running around at breakneck speed because you’re constantly 10 minutes behind means that something else controls your schedule and time.
You lose control when you regularly put the happiness of others before yourself.
People who constantly accept and predict bad experiences have lost control of the past. You might say I get sick this time every year. That’s a virtual guarantee that you’re going to get sick. Not only are you predicting it, but you made a positive statement that this is just something that naturally happens to you. It happened a few times before, so you believe it will happen again. Subconsciously, you think you have no control over it.
You get into societal pressures and live the life corporations and marketers want you to live.
You constantly put down yourself and others. The person who demeans and belittles people is doing this to prop themselves up. They knock you down so they’re above your level. This requires no work at all for them to improve their lives. They will never realize their dreams because they won’t make an effort. They would rather talk down to themselves or other people as a way to justify their current reality instead of trying to create a better life.
Some of those situations might not look too troubling to you. So what if you’re always a few minutes late? Does that really mean there’s some big problem that you need to address? Let’s answer that by considering the benefits of taking charge of your life in our next blog post.
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When you’re not in control of you life, oftentimes it’s because you’re not living your truth. Check out our blog post here for tips on living your truth and growing your self-worth.
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I’m Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits. Please go to businessofrehab.com/contractnegotiations to pick up the free guide to help you negotiate the contract of your dreams.
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Attention, Physiatrists! Stop leaving money on the table. Sign up for the free video series: How To Build A Profitable Practice in 90 Days or Less: http://www.sixtytosuccess.com
