What Repeated Behaviour Reveals About Your Life

The people in your life affect you every day, and you can't help but be caught up in their changing moods and their reactions to you. Similarly, of course, your moods and reactions affect the people close to you, which in turn changes how they act. But how people act around you is more important than you might think.

At this point, you need to set aside each person’s role in your life—and by that, I mean temporarily forget that they are your mother, brother or friend—and see them simply as a person. Looking at them in this way allows you to see more clearly how they are behaving and how they are affecting you.

Think about each person who is relevant in your life now and how they have affected you recently. You will naturally also think about what they want from you and what your responsibilities are to them. But these things can stop you from seeing their actions in the clearest way.

The best way to see them is to view the way they act specifically towards you as having a purpose in your life. But it is important to recognise which behaviour is significant for you and which is simply part of daily life. You can do this by noticing when their behaviour follows a pattern you have experienced before.

If the situation feels familiar, as though it has happened before, then it is important for you. For example, the person might be annoyed about something in a similar way to how they were annoyed when you did something in the past. This is your chance to gain something from the situation.

And as well as having the unavoidable pain that is involved in many of these situations, there is also an opportunity to become stronger because of it and to act in the best way so that you can be a better version of yourself. Also, if you can see that they are repeating a familiar pattern, then their actions will be predictable. And you can use this to help you navigate through the situation.

So, in order to get the most out of these situations, you first need to be aware of how the person is acting and which pattern they are following. Then you can act accordingly. A common pattern in your life might be receiving the same criticism from the same person.

ou may recognise this kind of criticism because it feels like a personal attack. When someone criticises you, it is natural to look inward and assume that you should change. But that does not necessarily mean that changing yourself is the right response.

Cou may recognise this kind of criticism because it feels like a personal attack. When someone criticises you, it is natural to look inward and assume that you should change. But that does not necessarily mean that changing yourself is the right response.

So, when someone is criticising you or is angry with you, and the situation is not threatening, it is often best to mentally close yourself off from the attack, let the person run out of steam and wait for it to blow over. This is difficult because the natural instinct when you feel attacked is to fight back. But fighting back is not necessarily strength and rarely brings the result you want.

Another pattern occurs when someone annoys or irritates you. Often, the full force of the feeling hits you afterwards and continues to return in waves. It might be a different person this time, but the feeling you cannot shake is probably familiar.

Each time you begin to forget about it, the irritation returns. So what should you do? When you see the person again, it is usually best not to react immediately, even though you may want them to realise what they did or see that they were wrong.

You do not need to make them see it immediately. If you can wait and tolerate the discomfort, your strong feelings will eventually subside, leaving you with a clearer sense of how to respond to that person.

Throughout the day, you can gauge how you are doing by noticing how people are acting around you and which situations are repeating. This will help you gain confidence in your understanding of how your life works.

Would You Like to Help Me Test a New Reflection Cycle?

I’m looking for a small number of people to test the first part of a new Enhanced Sense Living Reflection Cycle. It involves completing a written form by answering my questions about situations in your life. You can be as specific as you wish and only need to share details you feel comfortable sharing.

The aim is to help you understand what your situations are showing you. If you would like to take part, click below.

Apply to Take Part

Reading the Quiet Moments Between Life’s Changes

Life changes from time to time, but in between these changes are long periods where things stay the same. And if you're not happy with your life or how things are going, then these periods can seem like forever. I always thought of time as not being my friend at all.

I was always racing against it, losing it, or wasting it. And there was never enough of it. But in the last ten years, I've learned to work with it more.

I still often don't feel like I've got enough time to do everything, but I'm managing it better now. In the last ten years, my life, for the most part, has been changing in a good way, and there have been some, what I would call landmark changes, mixed in with other smaller changes. But first, I want to talk about the times in between.

Because the spaces in between the changes are important to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, this time helps me get used to the changes that have happened. Although it's very difficult for me to be patient in this part of the process.

As soon as I have change for the better in one area of my life, I instantly want change in the other areas too. But that's not how change works for me. So even though I think I'm ready for more change, I've found that I do need time to settle into it and get comfortable with it.

And this could take months and, for some things, even years. This "waiting" period also helps me get ready for the next change. Some change needs to be prepared for.

So now I need to talk about the changes. There are different kinds of changes that happen in my life, and they can be put into three categories. The first and easiest kind is an opportunity for change that comes to me out of the blue, without me doing anything.

This happened to me quite a few years ago. I was in a job that I didn't like that wasn't going anywhere, and suddenly I got a call offering me a better job. I didn't even have to think about it, I just knew it was the right thing to go for.

The second type of change is change that I have planned for. But of course, you never really know if something is going to happen until you do it. My wife and I wanted to move house, but we weren't really sure if we would be able to afford it.

And there were a few moments when we thought it wasn't going to happen. But we reached a point in our preparations and decided to go for it, and we were successful. The third change is something that is not planned and just starts spontaneously, just like this YouTube channel.

I haven't had the time or the motivation to do anything new for a long time. But the idea hit me one day, and I really felt like it would be a good thing for me to do. Starting something by myself and taking the initiative to do it in order to bring about change in my life had to feel right.

If change is forced too much by my own will and desire, then it never works for me. These three kinds of change have two things in common. First of all, there is an element of risk.

They involve me taking a chance. And secondly, they involve me needing to trust that things will work out for the best.

Spotting Difficult People and Protecting Your Peace

Everybody is different, and it’s impossible to get along with everybody, but I want to. I don’t want to have bad feelings between me and anybody in my life. But sometimes I do upset people and although it’s not on purpose I can’t find any way to avoid it.

So instead I just don’t take it personally. Maybe a little pain is good for them. I also find in my life that different people play different roles.

And by that I mean that there are a set number of characters and different people have filled those same roles in different times of my life. I’ll give you an example. For me there’s always that one person who gives me what I categorize as “trouble”.

If this person is in the workplace then the trouble could be them criticizing me for how I’m doing my job, or it could be them saying something like I might need to work on my day off. And often to someone else this trouble doesn’t seem very bad at all, but to me, it feels like the worst thing ever. And as my life has changed of course so have the people, but sure enough I’ll be having trouble from one specific person again and again, and then I’ll realize that they are now filling that role.

But this is the important thing for me. Identifying them is one part of it but because I know who they are I can “expect” to have trouble from them at any time and I can be ready for it. I can also react differently to them because now their role in my life has been clearly identified.

One strategy I have is to not react to what they say. As in the example earlier they might be saying that I need to do work on my day off or that something is going to happen at work that wouldn’t be good for me. But in the end it turns out that I don’t need to work or that the work thing doesn’t happen.

I used to freak out and worry about what they had said, but now this has happened so many times over the years, with the person I’ve identified as the trouble-person, that I’ve learned to not react to what they say and just trust that it’s really not going to happen. Another trend in my life that I’ve noticed is that people are often rude to me or say insensitive things seemingly without even realizing it. Or people ignore me when I say something, and it’s as if I haven’t even said a word.

How I deal with this is to, you guessed it, not react. The best thing by far for me to do is to let it go immediately, or if what I’ve said has been ignored I don’t pursue it or try to say it again. I take it as being something that I need to hear about myself or something that I shouldn’t have said.

But I’ve gotten used to people acting very strangely around me and as I said before, I just have to not take it personally. Another thing that happens which I’m never sure is good or bad is that people often share their problems with me or personal things about themselves, whether I’m close with them or not. Of course, it’s great that they can confide in me, but I will rarely give them advice.

Giving advice is dangerous. How can I possibly know what the best course of action is?