A question I have asked many individuals in one-to-one discussions and groups of people I have been working with has been: Are you living your life or is your life living you? This is not just playing with words; it is a very, very important question. It has major implications.

I have been involved in some very interesting and enlightening discussions as a result of asking that question. It has helped so many people realise that their approach to their life in so many ways is a passive one. Things happen to them; they accept them, learn to live with them; and then more things happen.

The irony of this is that we are constantly making choices, whether deliberate decisions or choices we make without even realising that we are doing so. And yet, despite all those opportunities to make changes, to move in a direction we would be happier with, so many of our choices result in maintaining the status quo, the passive life.

Many self-proclaimed gurus have made a great deal of money (or tried to) by offering magical solutions that can make you more successful, happier and better off in so many ways. A recurring theme in these is the process of ‘getting hold’ of your life, recognizing what is holding you back and then moving forward. Of course, by their very nature, these things tend to oversimplify complex issues, but their basic premise is fairly sound. But, we don’t need a magic solution; we just need to look carefully at what the comfortable routines we rely on are and, for each one, decide whether they are helping or hindering. That will then give us the basis of a plan for moving forward (preferably with the support of at least one person we fully trust). This is not necessarily simple or easy, but nor does it involve any magic spells or potions, literally or metaphorically.

We are habit-forming creatures and, for the most part, that is no bad thing. Habits unclutter life to a certain extent and give us a sense of familiarity, rhythm and security. They also save us a lot of time and effort. However, they also have their downside. They can block off interesting avenues of exploration; they can numb us so much that we miss important subtleties and miss out on important opportunities. They can stifle us.

Habits are inherently conservative, which is what can make them useful (they give us stability), but it is also what can make them problematic. We can so easily become controlled by our habits; we can become their puppets, rather than being the puppet masters.

Much of the time we are not even aware that we are relying on a habit; we slot so easily and comfortably into them. In a very real sense, our habits are part of who we are – our characteristic behaviours, our attitudes and what we feel comfortable (or ‘at home’) with. The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, used the term, ‘habitus’ to refer to our own private world, our own sort of personal culture. Its links with both habit and habitat are not coincidental – it is where we live, figuratively speaking and the routines that keep us there.

Our habitus is a source of comfort and security for the most part, but it can also become a prison if we allow ourselves to get too locked into it, no longer open to new experiences, opportunities and risks.

So, that brings us back to this key question: Are you living your life or is your life living you? To what extent you are successful in life (however you define success) is likely to depend in no small measure on how you answer it.

I have many years’ experience of working with people struggling with anxiety, depression, self-doubt and related emotional challenges. In general, most of them would be thinking that there was something wrong with them, that they were deficient in some way, or even ill. They would be surprised, and generally relieved, to learn that having demons – that is, emotional challenges – is quite a normal part of being human.

We all have them, but what distinguishes those people who don’t appear to have any such demons from those who appear to be struggling with them is mainly how well we are managing them – not whether or not we have them.

At root, life is fragile, vulnerable and insecure, but for the most part we tend to be very skilled at managing the challenges all this brings and very good at supporting one another through the difficulties. At times, life will be more challenging than is generally the case – for example, when we experience a major loss and we are flooded with feelings of grief. The next major loss may be a long way off or it may be just round the corner.

Some of us have us face emotional challenges more often than others; some of us struggle more with dealing with them when they do arise (often due to their severity and their frequency); and some of us have less support and understanding from the people around us than others do. So, it is certainly not simply a case of there being people who have demons to face and others who don’t. Demons, in the sense I am using them here, come with the territory – the territory of being human.

Where problems can become quite serious is where there are significant challenges to address, but our response is to bury our heads in the sand and just hope they will go away – the grieving person who tries to live as if their life has just gone through a major change; the person in an abusive relationship who hopes against hope that the violence will stop; the person who is struggling to find any sort of happiness who ‘just presses on’, as if there cannot be an alternative.

So, the first step is to recognise that we all have our emotional challenges, we all have demons that can haunt us, short or long term. That we have demons is therefore not necessarily a problem or anything to worry about. The second step is to recognise that we need to face them. The more we try to run away from them (or just ignore them), the larger they can loom and the more frightening they can become. By contrast, facing up to them can help us get them in perspective (especially if we don’t face them alone, if we have the support of trusted others, or at least a trusted other).

We can avoid the vicious circle of the demons getting bigger the more we turn our backs on them, and, instead, create a virtuous circle where facing them takes away a lot of their power, makes us feel more confident in dealing with them and sets us on a more positive route.

Demons flourish in the darkness. Turn the lights on, focus clearly on what you need to do, and those demons don’t seem to be anywhere near as threatening as they did before, especially if you are tackling them with support (and perhaps giving support to others who have their own demons to face).

Something I was taught at an early age that has stood me in good stead is the idea that, if you don’t believe in yourself, you can’t expect other people to believe in you. But, there’s more to it than just believing in yourself, you also have to demonstrate your self-belief. And you also have to be prepared to question that belief from time to time. Let’s look at each of these issues.

Having self-belief means that your ‘default’ setting (that is, the stance you will automatically adopt unless something happens to change it) is one where you do not doubt yourself. You do not put yourself down; you do not tell yourself ‘I can’t do this’ (negative self-talk, to use the technical term); you do not place obstacles in the way of your own progress; and nor do you invite other people to adopt a low opinion of you (believe it or not, these are all very common behaviours, so we really do need to be tuned into them and steer well clear of them).

This is not the same as arrogance or where you see yourself as infallible and invulnerable. It is about having a positive attitude towards your own capabilities and a willingness to learn from failure. This is vitally important, as fear of failure is a major barrier to self-belief. If we see failure as something shameful, we will be discouraged from trying new things and testing out the limits of our abilities (thereby limiting our learning opportunities, as these arise precisely at the limits of our current capabilities). By contrast, if we see failure as a stepping stone to success and therefore nothing to be ashamed of, we are going to be more open to trying new things (and therefore open to new learning and new successes).

Having self-belief, though, does not mean that you will show that you do. Many competent and confident people will come across misleadingly as lacking in self-belief. This is partly a cultural matter, as many cultures involve unwritten rules about how we come across to other people. For example, it is quite common in the culture I was brought up in for people, on receiving praise or a compliment, to respond with comments like: ‘It was nothing’ or ‘No, not at all’. Such comments can give the impression that we lack confidence and thereby deny us the credibility we need to influence people and make a positive difference. A response like: ‘Thank you, that is good of you to say so’ is likely to be a wiser one to give. So, what we need to do, then is strike a balance between coming across as arrogant and hiding our light under a bushel, as the saying goes.

But, we also have to make sure that we are allowing our self-belief to get the better of us. However capable, competent and confident we may be, we all have our limitations. Consequently, we need to be careful not to overstretch ourselves, to put ourselves in situations where, in effect, we are setting ourselves up to fail. We still need to be cautious, but there is a major difference between being prudently cautious and writing yourself off before you have even tried to do something. In other words, we need to have confidence in ourselves, but we must not allow that confidence to cross the line and become complacency.

Self-belief is not about thinking you are better than other people – it is not about a sense of superiority; it is about a sense of what the textbooks tend to call ‘personal efficacy’, and much of that is about gaining other people’s trust by starting off by trusting yourself.

Something I was taught at an early age that has stood me in good stead is the idea that, if you don’t believe in yourself, you can’t expect other people to believe in you. But, there’s more to it than just believing in yourself, you also have to demonstrate your self-belief. And you also have to be prepared to question that belief from time to time. Let’s look at each of these issues.

Having self-belief means that your ‘default’ setting (that is, the stance you will automatically adopt unless something happens to change it) is one where you do not doubt yourself. You do not put yourself down; you do not tell yourself ‘I can’t do this’ (negative self-talk, to use the technical term); you do not place obstacles in the way of your own progress; and nor do you invite other people to adopt a low opinion of you (believe it or not, these are all very common behaviours, so we really do need to be tuned into them and steer well clear of them).

This is not the same as arrogance or where you see yourself as infallible and invulnerable. It is about having a positive attitude towards your own capabilities and a willingness to learn from failure. This is vitally important, as fear of failure is a major barrier to self-belief. If we see failure as something shameful, we will be discouraged from trying new things and testing out the limits of our abilities (thereby limiting our learning opportunities, as these arise precisely at the limits of our current capabilities). By contrast, if we see failure as a stepping stone to success and therefore nothing to be ashamed of, we are going to be more open to trying new things (and therefore open to new learning and new successes).

Having self-belief, though, does not mean that you will show that you do. Many competent and confident people will come across misleadingly as lacking in self-belief. This is partly a cultural matter, as many cultures involve unwritten rules about how we come across to other people. For example, it is quite common in the culture I was brought up in for people, on receiving praise or a compliment, to respond with comments like: ‘It was nothing’ or ‘No, not at all’. Such comments can give the impression that we lack confidence and thereby deny us the credibility we need to influence people and make a positive difference. A response like: ‘Thank you, that is good of you to say so’ is likely to be a wiser one to give. So, what we need to do, then is strike a balance between coming across as arrogant and hiding our light under a bushel, as the saying goes.

But, we also have to make sure that we are allowing our self-belief to get the better of us. However capable, competent and confident we may be, we all have our limitations. Consequently, we need to be careful not to overstretch ourselves, to put ourselves in situations where, in effect, we are setting ourselves up to fail. We still need to be cautious, but there is a major difference between being prudently cautious and writing yourself off before you have even tried to do something. In other words, we need to have confidence in ourselves, but we must not allow that confidence to cross the line and become complacency.

Self-belief is not about thinking you are better than other people – it is not about a sense of superiority; it is about a sense of what the textbooks tend to call ‘personal efficacy’, and much of that is about gaining other people’s trust by starting off by trusting yourself.

Strange though it may sound, good enough sometimes isn’t good enough. Very often people are so busy that they will settle for getting things done to just about an acceptable standard and then start to focus on the next task, rather than get the first thing as far beyond ‘just good enough’ as possible. What we end up with then is mediocrity at best.

There is a technical term for this: satisficing. This is a made-up word, derived from combining satisfactory with sacrificing. It refers to the tendency for people to settle for what is satisfactory and thereby sacrifice producing the best results possible. Freud captured this idea when he said that the good is the enemy of the best, by which he meant that we can so easily fail to fulfil our potential by not looking beyond what is good enough.

Imagine being asked at a job interview: ‘How will you ensure that you achieve the most positive outcomes in your work?’ and replying with: ‘I won’t; as long as things are basically good enough, that will do me’. Not very impressive, is it?

But, it isn’t just about impressing (prospective) employers. It’s also a spiritual matter, in the sense that our personal strivings are what help us to get a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. Ironically, in the modern world personal strivings can so easily become materialistic: more money, more material goods, more of the things that ultimately don’t make much real difference to our spiritual well-being. It is ironic because focusing on material goals, rather than goals of achieving the best we can, will make it less likely that we will flourish enough in our work to earn the necessary income.

I am not suggesting that we should all become perfectionists, as that too brings its problems. We need to be balanced in our approach. Aiming for achieving the best we reasonably can is likely to give us a much better quality of life in a number of ways, not least in terms of giving us a stronger sense of purpose and, of course, the satisfactions to be gained from making as much of a positive difference as we can.

What can stand in the way of achieving our best is the problem of low morale. Operating in a culture of low morale will tend to sap motivation, undermine hope and, in so doing, make it more likely that we will settle for good enough. And, as is so often the case with low morale, this can lead to a vicious circle in which settling for surviving, rather than thriving, contributes to, and reinforces, low morale which then has the effect of making us more open to settling for just good enough.

Of course, it can be difficult to be positive and aim for thriving if you do happen to be faced with a context of low morale, but this means we then have to ask ourselves whether we want to struggle to do our best, despite the low morale (and thereby play at least a small part in eating away at that low morale), or make do with mediocrity (and thereby allow the low morale to eat away at us).

So, what is your idea of the best results you can achieve and what do you need to do make sure you are doing your best to achieve them? How can you make sure that setting for just good enough is a last resort, something you would only do when you really have to?

But, if you are already committed to thriving, rather than just surviving, how can you help those around you to appreciate the benefits of this approach and support them in adopting it?

‘I couldn’t help it’, ‘I had no choice’ and ‘It wasn’t my fault’ are commonly heard comments, but how often are they actually true? How often are we unaware of the choices we have been making or are actually trying to disguise the fact that what we did was based on a choice (or set of choices) we made?

Of course, there will often be situations where we don’t have a choice, where things are beyond our control. For example, if we spill water on our lap, we can’t choose whether or not to get wet (although we could choose to try not to get wet by putting a plastic sheet or equivalent across our lap – if we wanted to). But, in general terms we are making choices all the time, even though we may not realise it much of that time. This is partly because so many of our choices are ‘habitualised’ – that is, we have made the same choice so many times that we now more or less do it on automatic pilot, as it were. But, a habitualised choice is still a choice, in the sense that we can choose to behave otherwise. We don’t have to do something just because it is what we normally do. Consider the legal implications of this. If you tend to drive too fast and, as a result of that, you cause an accident in which somebody dies or is seriously injured, you will be held responsible for your actions – saying that it was your habit to drive that fast does not mean that you are not responsible for the choice(s) you make and their consequences.

What also complicates matters is that so-called common sense will often mislead us into thinking that we are not making choices when in fact we are. This takes us back to the ‘I couldn’t help it’ type of response I mentioned earlier. These types of situation are quite common – for example, when someone fails to do something they promised to do and claims it was due to factors beyond their control, when in reality it was down to choices that were made.

What we have to recognise is that, whatever situation we are in, there will always be choices – however limited the range of options due to the circumstances, there will always be options (even if we do not like any of those options). And, of course, the choices we make will always have consequences, sometimes minor, sometimes major.

This is why it is important that we choose wisely. This involves, first of all, being aware of the choices we are making (including the habitualised choices) and not trying to pretend that matters within our control are not our responsibility. This is not about blame, it is about ownership. It is about empowerment.

Once you are aware of the choices, you can consider the various options and the associated consequences that arise from them. Thinking carefully about the respective consequences can then help us make wise choices.

Of course, our choices will often be made on the basis of our feelings, rather than rational thoughts, but it is still the case that being aware of those choices, the options available and the likely consequences can none the less be very helpful when it comes to choosing wisely. Choices rooted in emotional reactions are still choices. We can balance head and heart, especially if we are tuned in to our choice making and don’t play the game of trying to deny that so much of what we do is rooted in the choices we make.