Life Success Through Self-Support

Life success through self reliance

20 Jan 2020

David’s start to life revolved around many foster homes and living on the street. He struggled with a drug addiction and the inner battle with demons from his past. He realised that the only person he could rely on was himself. Since realising this, David has got clean in body and mind and now uses his experiences as inspiration to himself and others to live fully, not an excuse to live poorly.

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David was a happy-go-lucky young boy who had a natural curiosity for life and adventure. He craved attention from others and would often be the one to make others laugh even if it was at his own expense. But life dealt David an average hand. He never knew his father and his mum couldn’t look after herself. David spent his formative years in foster homes, where he never found any real connection with his carers.

David grew frustrated with life and began going down a path of self-harm by running away and living on the street. David lived on the street for a number of years and during that time he became addicted to smoking cigarettes and marijuana. He found a connection with those he would get high with and was able to forget his upbringing and the lack of connection with the world for a little while.

David knew his running away was a cry for help. He knew that smoking cigarettes was a way to harm himself because he didn’t feel worthy of a healthy life, just like he knew that getting high was an easy way to numb the pain he felt inside. He also knew that there was nothing outside of himself that would make any difference until he made the choice to help himself. Of course, this is David in hindsight; at the time he didn’t look at it this way. It was only over time David recognised his inner journey and the evolution that eventually gave rise to success through self reliance.

David met and listened to many homeless people during his time on the streets. Some had seemingly genuine reasons for being there while others he thought, had sold out to excuses. He wondered which side he was on. Eventually he realised that he had been holding onto a sense of entitlement that the world owed him something. That for some reason he was harder done by than anyone else. Instinctively he knew that if he continued feeling entitlemed in this way, that his life would simply become harder and that he would actually deserve that harder life because he was the one creating it.

After a few years on the street and trying to run away from his problems, David began to take responsibility for his life. It was very hard at first as there was so much confusion over why he was born into the situation that he was. But he understood the need for self-support and persisted. He truly wanted to better himself and his capacity for self-reliance. He quit smoking cigarettes as he wanted to live a long and healthy life. His marijuana habit was easier to break than he thought once he made the choice to learn from his life experiences instead of hiding from them.

David humbly accepted help from the government to get back on his feet and promptly found a safe and comfortable place to live. He began looking for basic jobs that would help him pay the bills. With his new attitude he found a job with a manager who appreciated David’s optimistic outlook despite his troubled past and his impressive capacity for self-reliance.

David rose to a position of authority within the company and he was so surprised at how simple his own transformation was. He traced his life back to the turning point and discovered that it was when he decided to live on the “cause” side of his life rather than the “effect”. He understood that by taking responsibility for how his future was going to be he could actually create how he wanted it to be. He realised that when his life wasn’t going the way he wanted, it was still him who was creating that life and making it harder for himself.

One area that David was challenged with for the longest time was this: how could he have been the cause of his difficult childhood? His life in foster care and on the street when he was too young to do anything about it? How was it possible, he wondered, to not feel ripped off by life?

Here, David had an epiphany. He recognised that if he had not been born into such a significant struggle he would never have developed the self-relience and internal resources that had allowed him to be the person he is today. He realised that it was because of his challenges, not in spite of them, that he is now living a happy and sustainable life. Success through adversity was his achievement.

David now shares his story with younger foster children and homeless people and he will often go out of his way to interact with them. He knows their struggle because he has lived though it. He can connect with them at a level that the qualified psychologists and doctors never could, simply because they do not have David’s lived experience.

Even though his transformation continues and the progress he has made has taken years, David feels that his transformation happened in an instant — the moment he made the choice to take responsibility for how his life was turning out. From that point it was always going to take some time but making the choice only takes a single moment.

David has high hopes for his future because he knows that he has already come so far and the reason for his progress comes from self-reliance — a source within himself. He still has setbacks and is still challenged by them. But he continues to work through them and grapple with his past mistakes as well as the new mistakes he makes on a daily basis. He shares his story with others and his key message is this: the quality of our life is determined mostly by what we do about what happens, not just what happens.

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Photo by Nitish Meena on Unsplash

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Peter Borda

Peter Borda is a Mindset and Emotional Management Coach based in Whyalla, South Australia, working with individuals and organisations globally. Peter's passion and focus is to expedite the speed of transformation for those seeking to enjoy more of what life offers. Through the utilization of proven world class mindset and behaviour adjustment techniques Peter helps those he serves to break through restrictive thought pattern loops and unlock their latent qualities and resources that would otherwise have laid dormant for too many years.