If you are sitting around wallowing in a life you don’t love, hoping to be rescued by your knight in shining armor, it’s time you stop playing the victim and become the hero of your life.

Waiting for your knight in shining armor might look like this:

• Hoping you win the lottery.
• Waiting to date when you finally lose the weight.
• Staying in a crummy relationship so you don’t have to leave or break up.
• Staying in the dead end job, you hate, because you’re too afraid of conflict.
• Hoping a cleaning fairy comes over and cleans up your clutter.

Guess what? No one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself. You have to take your power back. You have to learn to make yourself the priority.

You have to shift from being a victim to being a hero.

If you are stuck in a rut feeling sorry for yourself, thinking the universe or god has dealt you a shitty hand, you have got to get over it. Someone out there has it much worse than you do and they thrive within their circumstances. It’s a choice they make and you can do it too.

It’s what you BELIEVE.

Personal responsibility isn’t fun to talk about but it’s the key to creating an awesome life. Not only do you have to take personal responsibility for what you are doing, you also have to take responsibility for what you are not doing. Your actions or lack of actions.

Most importantly, you must take responsibility for what you are choosing to believe. What are you choosing to believe about yourself? What are you allowing and tolerating, not only from others but also from yourself?

You have to stop believing you are a victim, not good enough, lazy, not as smart as, or that you are destined to be fat, poor, and untalented. If you choose to believe these types of things about yourself, this is who you will be.

You can change your beliefs.

It’s so simple and yet it’s not simple, first you have to recognize them. Deep beliefs are tricky because they feel like the truth. We don’t question the truth; we just believe it.

Are you focusing on how you don’t measure up? Do you find that you let yourself off the hook because you aren’t as lucky, as rich, as driven as someone else is? Do you blame genetics for being overweight, angry, or lacking talent?

I call bullshit. You have to catch yourself in this way of thinking. These BELIEFS. You have to recognize where you are holding yourself back and start to change your internal messaging. Start by simply recognizing and catching it in the moment. Change the thought around. Every time you think it. For example, I liked to blame my lack of commitment on my family. My family just doesn’t have it in us to be committed to things. I began to recognize this and every time that thought-belief crossed my mind I would say to myself - I’m blazing a new trail for me, I’m becoming the most committed I can be.

I believed I wasn’t as motivated as other people, I would find all kinds of evidence that proved to me I’m just not as much of a go-getter as other people I knew. I began to catch these thoughts and change from; I’m just not a go-getter to - Hell yeah! I’m a go-getter! I’m taking care of business, in fact, I’ll do it right now.

We have to remember that our beliefs and our thoughts are the seeds of our actions.

If we don’t like the life we have, we have to take personal responsibility for it; our thoughts become things after all.

Another way we get ourselves into trouble is by people pleasing.

We dream about a Knight in Shining Armor because we want our life or our circumstances to be different than they are, but we don’t want to have to do the work to change them. We want the quick fix, the magic pill.

Our animal brains want us to do what’s easy, and in the moment, pleasing people is generally the easier option. It’s much easier to say yes and regret it later than to suck it up and say no right away.

We become over scheduled, overwhelmed, tired, and we have created this chaotic life one poor choice at a time. Mainly because we’ve changed our mind or never actually spoke up in the first place.

We are doing things we don’t want to do because we are too afraid to disappoint or be selfish.

We also may be too afraid to speak up and be our authentic selves because someone may judge us.

To be your own Knight in Shining Armor you will depend on yourself.

You will learn to feel the fear but do things anyway. You will say no to others and more often say yes to yourself. You will practice until you are very capable of being strong, motivated, and empowered to live your life, your way.

You won’t be waiting for rescue because you won’t need to be rescued. You will be creating life your way, and you won’t want to escape it.

If you are waiting for someone to rescue you, I bet you are also doing a lot of rescuing.

Rescuing other people rarely helps them in the end. It’s one thing to lend a hand or help to lift someone up but same as it is with yourself, the person wouldn’t need rescuing if they were taking personal responsibility in their own life.

I get that some people have accidents, unforeseen problems and other disabilities that impair their ability to be very self-reliant but that is the exception, not the rule.

We all have life stuff. Death, loss, illness. We all have to cope with life’s hardships.

If you aren’t telling them no when that is what you really want to do, you are rescuing them from disappointment and disappointing yourself instead.

If you agree to help or constantly say yes to obligations and later resent them, you are rescuing someone and in turn wishing someone would come along and rescue you back.

Stop waiting and start taking action.

Becoming your own knight in shining armor requires practice but offers so much reward. When you stop waiting around and begin taking action in your life, you will transform your reality, creating the life you desire.

Stop living in and escaping to fantasyland and start today.