None of us chose the situations we were born into. But if the particular circumstances of your upbringing, or the life you are living now makes you realise that you need more balance and control in your life, the good news is that your future can be very different from your past.
Cultivating self-control and gaining a sense of balance and control over your life is a journey and an ongoing process that requires time and effort, self-analysis, and gradual growth.
Here are some of the methods and the realizations which have helped me in achieving increasing levels of self-control and overall balance in my life:
1) Own your power and understand who you are: You are a valuable human being and a unique individual—a valuable human being separate from the perception of others, a person with the ability to think, to reason, and to evaluate information for yourself.
2) Recognise that your choices decide what direction your life can go in.
3) Understand that everything does not have to be complicated, complex and difficult for it to be worthwhile and true. In most cases, common sense and simplicity are the shortest paths to our goals.
4) Learn to stop wasting your valuable time and energy by fretting over the things you simply cannot control—weather variables, traffic and crowds, taxes, the behaviour of others etc. Instead, you can resolve to try to calmly accept the things you can't change.
5) Realise, (this being a gradual and a continuous process), that it is inevitable that there will be setbacks, challenges and frustrating periods in every person’s journey.
6) And because we all have faults and flaws, we will benefit from learning to exercise understanding and patience when dealing with the people we come into contact with, while realizing that it will not be possible to get along with every person or to please everybody all the time.
7) The only thing we can do, therefore, is to concentrate on our own selves and to focus on our self-improvement. And of course, we should practice, and keep practicing.
The more we practice these steps, the more readily we will find ourselves feeling more in control of our own lives.
We will also find that we greatly increase our levels of self-control; and feel that we are achieving more and more of a sense of balance in our lives. As a result, we are likely to find our emotional load lightened, and ourselves calmer, happier, and healthier human beings.