Be the Chief Driver of Your Life Bus. Becoming the driver of your life bus is the first rule for the ride of your life, and it is where you need to start. You need to assume liability for your life to drive the correct way toward your objectives and dreams.
Being the driver of your bus means taking control and directing your life in the manner in which you need it to go. That is actually quite difficult, however, it additionally can begin with one little change. Try not to be reluctant to discover what your alternatives are.
Be the Chief Driver of Your Life Bus
Life is a journey, and we never know when we will be near the finish of our life venture. We are all riding in a bus called Life Bus getting in some direction towards our life journey.
When you take control of your life bus, you gain the ability to take it wherever you want to go. we need to take control of our actions and lives to make sure we get the best results for ourselves.
“Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.” ~ Wayne Dyer.
Be the Chief Driver of Your Life Bus. Often, most people feel like they have no command or control in where their life bus is going or how it is going to get there in their life journey. But the good news is to become the driver of your own life bus, because, without this, you won’t be the one driving and charting the course for success.
Be mindful in dealing with unruly “bus passengers. We’re driving the bus of our life. We have a whole bunch of often unruly passengers in the back. The passengers are our thoughts and feelings. At times they can be a nuisance. Often our best strategy is simply to continue driving in the direction of our values and goals.
Some of the passengers we all have at times in the back of our buses are anxious, fearful, depressed, anger, and worried.
Mindfulness treats these mental contents as passing flow – like traffic noise outside our window, or like leaves floating past on a stream. Our task is to let the mind noise be, let it flow by. It’s not what’s important. It’s part of being human and we can treat ourselves gently as we struggle with mental contentment.
So our task is to realize that the mind noise is a normal part of the human condition, to treat ourselves with gentleness and encouragement, and to focus on what matters – whether it is our values and the tasks we have set ourselves, or (in meditation practice) our breath, our bodies, and other objects of attention in the present moment. There’s much evidence to show that developing this ability to be mindful can help us in many overlapping and important ways.
The other thing is to be the listener. You need to listen to the ‘passenger’ language in your colleagues, friends, and family. Listen and watch for it, too, in the things you read and see. You’ll be astonished at how widespread it is – from executives attributing their failure to government policy, to individuals sidestepping their choices because someone didn’t give them something. Listen for people shifting the responsibility for their choices, their actions, and their reactions to some external cause.
Remember that the passenger mentality is deeply held and no one will thank you for challenging it. Far better to practice being able to spot it and practice spotting yourself doing it first. When you start driving, people will notice soon enough.
And my other tip is to start small. Let’s say you open your middle desk drawer and notice all the mess in there. Your internal dialogue starts up – It’s not my fault, I have so much work to do I’m so stressed they expect too much of me around here I never get time to clear up, and so on.
All of a sudden you have gone from an untidy drawer to reinforcing your view of yourself as a put-upon victim of circumstance and greedy bosses. That’s what I mean by listening out for ‘passenger talk’. Take a driver’s view of it. OK, it’s a mess. I don’t have time to get to it now. I’m OK with leaving it as a mess for now or I’m going to take everything out of it at lunchtime and put it straight.
Be the Chief Driver of Your Life Bus. Becoming a driver is your choice. It is a decision that you make, and it is one of promise and purpose. The decision to become a driver of your life bus is what sets you on the road to your personal goals.
It is one that I have taken and it is one that I’ve seen many others take as a start to an incredible new future.
Most people spend their today just to make today’s living. While some sacrifice their today to secure their future.
We are all going through the life journey, but often we don’t realize who is driving our Life Bus. We just let others drive our life bus. Think, it could be your boss, your family, or friends.
We take a back seat and become victims of the life journey. We go where things around us make us go.
We think we don’t have the power to change things. This is not true. Get up and take the driver’s seat. If your life bus is not going to your destination, change the direction. Don’t just be a victim of your life, be the driver. Be the creator. Create your own life and create your own destiny.
You are here on the earth to do something great. Ask, your heart knows very well what it is. You have all the potential. You are supposed to live an extraordinary life. There are no other powerful living beings like humans. So what are you waiting for? Every moment passing will never come again.
There were countless people like you who think they will change the world in the future but it never came. Only a few of them realized the value of today.
“Every man dies. Not every man really lives.” ~ Braveheart
Are you expecting better circumstances after 3 or 15 years? The perfect time never comes. Read the biography of any great person from history. It was never perfect for them when they started. But once they started things started happening.
They did not accept what they do not want from life. They strived for what they wanted and eventually got it by working on it every day. They were the driver of their life bus.
Don’t wait so long. By that time, your life bus could have gone far away, and maybe you have to come back a long distance to start your life journey again. And you will never have much time then.
What do you want from your life? How do you want to be remembered? What difference do you want to make in this world? Wake up and work for it.
If you think and act like a passenger you probably don’t believe that having what you want is possible, so you avoid thinking about it.”
“Exactly right, one of the first keys to figuring out what you really want in life is to think like a driver and before we go any further, I’d like you to practice this.”
“Think about where you are in life right now, the state of your finances, your happiness, your job, your relationships, the amount of fun you have, and say to yourself I’m where I am right now because I drove my bus right here.”
Be the Chief Driver of Your Life Bus. Don’t blame yourself when you fail. It’s not about blame. Blame makes you feel bad and rarely leads to action. Taking responsibility helps you treat the results you get as data and helps you think about alternative actions.”Blame is a feeling, an emotional response, like guilt. Taking responsibility creates an uncomfortable feeling, so we need to avoid anything that might make us feel that way.
Passengers in a life bus do not want to be blamed so they look to shift the feeling somewhere else. It’s safer, and it feels nicer, to blame others or your circumstances or your past.
This leaves you stuck though. If you are just a victim of circumstance how could you possibly change your life? You have to find a way of taking responsibility without feeling blamed.
The question is; How do I do that then.? Well, one way is to think of your results so far as data. I made these choices and this happened. If I make different choices, different things will happen. It’s not about blame (which leaves you stuck). It’s about taking responsibility.
What drivers do is recognize the part they played in what happened and think about what else they could do. For instance, a driver knows…
- That they can always choose their reaction
- That they can always choose where to focus
- That they can always choose their next action
- And that if they have driven their bus somewhere they didn’t like, they can always drive it somewhere else.
You can only do this, though, if you are willing to take 100% responsibility for the choices, reactions, focus, and actions that brought you to where you are now. This is neither nice nor very comfortable but it is very, very powerful because if you drove your bus here then you can pretty much drive it somewhere else.
Be the Chief Driver of Your Life Bus. Reasons or Results?
Reasons is a polite word really. Reasons are excuses and they often have to do with blaming something or someone else for the lack of results. ‘Sorry I’m late, it was the traffic, ‘It’s not my fault I can’t lose weight, it’s those food manufacturers selling all that fatty food’ and so on. In case you’re hoping to have a critical effect on your future course, one thing you can do right presently is settle on a choice to turn into an outcomes individual.
It’s simple really, all you need to do is get rid of all your reasons. Stop inventing them and stop using them. Without reasons, the only things that are left will be results. Generating reasons usually stops you from looking at your results. Did you know there is a big clue that tells you when you are going to get a reason instead of a result? It’s a three-letter word, a dead giveaway, hear this word and you know there will be a reason coming along soon.”
It’s the word TRY. When you hear this word you know that a reason is coming. Let me give you an example from home.
My wife is going out for the evening and just before she leaves she asks me to tidy up the kitchen and wash up while she’s out.
When she comes back some hours later the place is still a tip. She’s understandably upset and feels let down but, luckily for me, I have a good defense. I tried (just as I promised) but this happened and that happened.
I rehearse my list of reasons secure in the knowledge that they let me off the hook. Does any of this sound familiar?
If you want to give yourself the power to create all the results you want (and who doesn’t?) then start by banning the word try from your daily life and work. A results person does things or does not do them while a reasons person tries things and then invents excuses to cover themselves. The truth is though that it’s impossible to try to do things.
Every time you use the word try you are setting yourself up to create reasons. Promise yourself that from now on you will either do things or not do them – no more trying. And that includes figuring out what you really want. No more trying to figure out what you want, you are either going to do it or you’re not going to do it.
Finally, Fernando Alonso once said: “I don’t want to just be a good driver: I want to be a complete driver and hopefully the best driver in the world.”