Existential Psychology

Follow Your Own Path

By  | 

Don’t let your important life decisions be determined by people with their own agendas or by those who only have a passing interest in what you have going on. It’s tempting to do because it frees you of the heavy burden of existential responsibility, but if you don’t follow your own path you will end up regretting it.

Asking for advice, for an objective opinion from a trusted source, is one thing but ultimately the onus is on you to decide whether this opinion syncs up with that feeling deep inside of you telling you which course of action is the correct one to take. From a self-actualization point of view profound regret is much more likely to haunt you if you live the life someone else tells you to live, even if you find external success, than if you live the life you know is yours and battle failures along the way.

If you follow your own path you will have passion and a sense of meaning to sustain you, which will make you much more resilient when you encounter setbacks and roadblocks. Human life is oh so short, and you only get one crack at it. When an Australian nurse named Bonnie Ware recorded the dying regrets of her patients, the first one on the list was “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected of me.”

And there’s the rub. All the people trying to control you, manipulate you, even those who think they have your best interests at heart, aren’t you. It’s your life they are trying to influence, yours and yours alone. The question is whether you’re going to use your life to follow your own path or to follow one laid out for you by someone else.

Related posts:

  1. Why It Is Never Too Late To Follow A New Career Path As we have already written, one of the most common reasons out there for not pursuing a desired career path is advanced age. The feeling is that the time has passed, that it would have been nice but it just isn’t practical now. There’s a wonderfully practical way to refute this argument, and it’s that […]...
  2. Passion is the Key to Success “If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.” – William James Lots of clients wonder why they fell short while friends and acquaintances found success. Most of them end up coming to a similar conclusion after careful analysis, which is that they just didn’t care enough to stick with what […]...
  3. Now I saw someone repost an article I did called ‘Path of Mastery’ with the added comment ‘Path TO Mastery’ and smiled to myself because I chose the title quite purposefully. Actually the insistence on using the preposition ‘to’ is indicative of how most of us in the West think about life, and changing our mentalities […]...
  4. Running Away From Your Problems People say you can’t run away from your problems but that’s not precisely true. It depends on what kind of problems we’re talking about. When they’re external to you and outside of your control, meaning when their source emanates from some variable in the environment and you have have little or no influence over this […]...
  5. Actively Embrace Challenges The biggest reason people avoid challenges of all kinds in their lives is that they don’t like how it feels to fail. Removing any and all real challenges from the life situation effectively makes failure a non-entity. But the price paid for psychic comfort is boredom. And the benefit gained from pursuing challenging activities and […]...
  6. Natural Ability And Passion There are people who are passionate about an endeavor but don’t have much natural ability in it and there are people who have a lot of natural ability in an endeavor but aren’t very passionate about it. The key for your happiness and success is to find, through trial and error, an area of interest […]...
  7. Attaining Mastery Even if you focus all your energy on one pursuit, consistently giving everything you have to it, the result might still be failure. If you do like most people do, starting up that new pursuit while continuing to dabble in many other pursuits at the same time, the result will almost definitely be failure. We […]...
  8. Concrete Steps To Reach Your Dreams One reason more people don’t reach their dreams is that their dreams remain ephemeral, pleasant enough to ponder but difficult to attain since what they are hoping to attain is indefinable. In the existential sense dreams represent by their very nature expansiveness, and so many are allergic to any input that might constrict these expansive […]...
  9. Follow Your Internal Compass So many people think they are following their conscience when what they are really following is external authority that has been internalized over the years. This is really pseudo-conscience; instead of making life choices based on what your Self needs to thrive your life choices are based on what the society you find yourself living […]...
  10. Don’t Let Your Passion Get Sucked Out By The Trolls If you become passionate about and active in a cause, any cause, it could be helping stray dogs find homes, it could be planting trees in inner cities, it could be trying to raise money for combating an obscure disease, it could be anything at all really, before long you’ll surely find yourself confronted by […]...
  11. Walk Your Own Path “No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” – Frederick Nietzsche Subordination in all its forms is usually cast in a negative light but the truth is that most of us are desperate to subordinate ourselves in some way […]...
  12. Chase Your Dreams We are going to discuss why chasing your dreams is a positive thing for mental health even if they seem far-fetched or never come to fruition. It’s a tragedy that parents, teachers, friends, and colleagues are usually quick to discount a person’s life plan or career goals as unrealistic or impossible to achieve. They are […]...
  13. Interest In Life It takes many people a long time being depressed before they come to terms with it, admitting to themselves and others that they are indeed depressed and need help. We get good at masking and rationalizing symptoms when we don’t want to see them. In the very early stages, before these symptoms are basically hitting […]...
  14. Self-Actualization And Sticking With One Interest If you have spread your time and attention amongst different hobbies, activities, and disciplines throughout your life and gotten pretty good in many of them but reached mastery level in none of them this article is for you. The real question is, what made you switch from one interest to the next before getting far […]...
  15. Never Let A Bad Teacher Crush Your Dreams Most of  us like to think of teachers as benevolent, supportive, encouraging mentors whose only goal is to get the best out of their students. But of course that image doesn’t always sync up with reality. There are a lot of mean spirited, frustrated, despairing teachers out there who take out their negativity around the […]...
  16. Follow Your Passion The source of unending boredom for one person is the source of deep interest for another. If we can agree that we’re not all born with the same constitutions and temperaments and that this fact is okay, then it follows that we’ll be pulled forward by different interests and that this should be okay too. […]...
  17. The Courage To Follow Your Dreams The problem with leaving your present set of circumstances in order to follow your dreams is that the outcome is up in the air. Following your dreams is a gamble, a risk, it’s trading certainty for uncertainty, and any time we trade certainty for uncertainty painful existential anxiety is born. If you were absolutely sure […]...
  18. Find Your Path It’s pretty alarming how many of us do not find our jobs meaningful or challenging. Imagine you had access to a time machine and buzzed back to a conference with the fifteen year old version of you. Would you be proud to report on the path you have chosen? Would you have a few words […]...
  19. Path of Mastery We are going to discuss some psychological ideas that will help you stay on the path of  mastery in your chosen undertaking. I will throw out some things for you to consider at the various stages from excited beginner to skilled master. The American way is often to set our sights on a goal and […]...
  20. Choosing The Right Career Path It’s a fact that many people who choose their own career paths don’t have much passion for or even interest in what they do for a living. The most important psychological reason why is that societal forces are powerful, all too powerful. They usually have more say over conscious thought and intention than our own […]...
Related Items