Caged, Comfortable, or Charged - Which Life is Yours?

I believe there are three kinds of life. And depending on where we're at on that spectrum of lives, we're going to have a different quality of life. If we're on this side of the spectrum, we're often miserable and suffering and struggling and upset all the time. And if we're over here, we're fully engaged and energized and enthusiastic. And knowing where we are on this spectrum can completely change our lives because we can make a decision about what type of life we want to live. The first type of life I believe a lot of people live is the caged life. And the caged life is just that. It feels like you're caged, like you're trapped. You're trapped in, you know, your past, or you're trapped in your current circumstances. Maybe you're trapped in other people's expectations. Maybe you're just trapped in your own personal limitations of belief or behavior. And you don't feel like you can break free. You don't feel like you can have that emotional freedom or that time freedom or that financial freedom. You truly feel trapped. And, you know, everyone's been there sometimes in their life where they just don't feel like they can get out of something or they feel like they're really struggling. But, you know, over a period of time, the cage life has a look, it has a feel, it has a sound. You know, if you take a big animal and you throw it into the zoo and put it behind bars, that big animal will stalk in frustration and fire and want to get out of there. Over a period of time, though, that animal soon becomes resigned, and it goes back towards the back of the cage and it sits there angry and frustrated, looking out into the world. And as an animal looks out into the world, it often has that resignation of anger and frustration. And you can tell when a person is there, though, because they often say something and they have this recurring pattern of communication that if you just listen, you'll know that somebody's trapped in the cage life. Because when they're back there, when they're resigned, when they're frustrated and they're looking at all those successful, lucky people who are just born with all of that or just they got lucky, right? When they look to the world, they often point to the world in anger and they say, they don't understand me. And they have this fire in them that believes that other people can't understand them, that they are trapped in something that nobody else could understand. And the great tragedy of all that is a very simple thing. Is that those very people who say they can't understand me or they don't know those people, their anger separates them from other people. And now they're less likely to be the ones who ask for help. And yet they're the ones who need the help. And we can't forget that. The reality of the person who's angry and resigned in life and saying, nobody understands me, they're really operating from a place. And it's tough to say to people, but they're really operating from a place that's very high in ego. They believe that they're so special and their circumstances are so special. They believe that, well, no one else has ever had cancer. No one else has ever had lost somebody. No one else has ever gone bankrupt. No one else could ever understand me. But the reality is, out of 7 billion people and thousands of years of history, somebody's been through it before. But their belief that nobody has been through it before makes them less likely to ask for help. And the caged life, over a period of time, starts to feel miserable. And usually only two things change your life. Either something new comes into your life and rattles your cage or breaks you free. Maybe that rattling of your cage is, you know, maybe you get lucky, you win the lottery, or a new person comes in your life and changes your life, or a new circumstances, a new opportunity comes in. It forever alters the course of your life. It breaks you free. But for a lot of people, the second thing that changes our lives is nothing new has to come into our lives. Something new has to come out of us. We have to make a different decision about who we're going to be and what we're going to go after in life, about how hard we're going to work, about what we truly, truly demand of ourselves every single day, about how limited our lives will be by choice, not by circumstances. And at some point, the people who've been living a cage life, after a period of time of watching enough people go by who are succeeding, if maturity lands on them, it lands on them with an impulse to say, I got to take control over the direction of my life. I've got to break free from these bars because I've set them up. At some point, we've come to realize, I think, in maturity, that we set our own cages, we build our own bars, and that there was always a door over here that we could get out of, but we never made the choice to. And when we finally decided to change our life, we're more likely to go out that door. But we always have to remember, you know, never forget that when you knock on the door of opportunity, that it is work who answers. It's going to take a lot of work to change your life, to break free from the bars, to get going again. But I think that's the great opportunity. And when people finally break through that cage and they get out in the open and have more freedom in their life, that kind of life has a quality too. It feels incredibly different. That kind of life feels more free. And that kind of life over a period of time is incredible because you have more, more freedom to direct yourself, more freedom to do things. And what ends up is people end up with deeper skills. They end up chasing their passions more often. That often as they get on a roll, they start becoming more successful. As they become more successful, the things they think that they wanted in their lives come into their lives. They got the two car garage, the white picket fence, the house, the kids, the friends, the dinner parties, enough to get by and maybe a little bit more. And soon after a period of time, that excitement of that breaking free and getting into that new kind of life, that kind of life, it feels more comfortable. So we call it the comfortable life. And in that comfortable life, we do feel that way. We feel a sense of satisfaction, a greater sense of confidence about who we are, about what life is really about, about where we're going in life. We feel heightened degrees of competency, knowledge, skills, abilities. We feel like we kind of got our life under control, things are good. But over a period of time in the comfortable life, something also rattles within and stirs within. Maybe not a frustration, but maybe somewhat of a sense of a restlessness. And that restlessness is this feeling and this sense that maybe there is something more. And people who have a comfortable life, they also have a communication pattern. They also say something on a recurring basis that you can tell they're in a comfortable life. Because what ends up happening is one day someone says to you, so how's everything going? And even though you have all the reason in the world to say life is amazing, you find yourself and hear yourself starting saying, when people ask how your life is going, you say, well, it's fine. And the it's fine is the tell of the comfortable life. It's the tell that there must be something more, there must be another quality, another kind of life. And that reveals to us that there is this other thing called the charged life. And the charged life has a different quality and feel to it as well. There's heightened levels of first and foremost, energy there. People are more passionate when they're living the charged life. And because they are more passionate, they feel more of the charge. It's not a one time spot, it's not once in a while I feel good. It's an enduring state of passion and happiness and satisfaction. But it's an enduring state that is triggered not by comfort, but rather by challenge. That when we challenge ourselves to go just a little beyond our current competencies, our knowledge, skills and abilities, when we're able to push ourselves just a little bit further, that's when we start to feel charged. Because so much of what we know by neuroscience, of what actually charges our brains, of what actually enlivens us in our brains, what we can see by oxygenation, blood flow to specific parts of our brain, to the hormonal releases we can measure in the back of our brain. From whether it's dopamine, vasopressin, oxytocin, serotonin. These things often happen because we're heighteningly engaged with something that's challenging us just a little beyond our current level. Like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi often talks about it in psychology as this concept of flow, of doing something where you're so engaged with it and you're so engaged with it because it's just a little bit harder than usual. So you're not quite comfortable, you're just a little bit out of comfort zone, not totally out of comfort zone and completely overwhelmed, but appropriately challenged to stretch yourself. And the qualities that the charge life basically have are there's a heightened and sustained level of energy and engagement, but also enthusiasm. And that's the magic. You know, if you want to have a fully charged life, you have to start looking forward to things again. You have to get excited about tomorrow again. You have to see your life developing again. You have to set yourself on a path where you're step by step progressing every single day. So you know, tomorrow's gonna be better than it was today, that, you know, tomorrow you're gonna become more of who you know, you can become that, you know, tomorrow by yourself, simple choices, by your simple sets of disciplines and habits, that you're going to evolve into your highest self. And that is the path of the charged life. This constant engagement with the best within us, of pushing ourselves, but with that purpose and that progress of hoping to become our highest selves. And when you live in that place and you sense that every single day, that's the magic. That's when what life should feel like that's what I think we all deserve, and maybe we ought to start aiming and challenging ourselves just a little bit more to get there.