It is always worth our time to focus on changing an emotional habit that hinders us from living our best possible lives.  Loneliness is one of them.

The time you spend on healing and growing yourself out of a negative state like loneliness or any other negative state is worth everything.  No money, nothing of earthly good can match what you can gain by powerfully empowering yourself this way.

When loneliness plagues your life, it is imperative to get free of it. 

To get free, you must get into the driver seat of your life

Getting at the root of the problem of loneliness and tackling their causes are you taking the wheel.

So let’s drive.

As I mentioned in my last, “How to stop being lonely,” there are the root causes of this plague, the loneliness.

The first step is getting in touch with a very important truth.  This is truth is that you are lovable.

Getting in the driver’s seat of your belief, of your lovability, is the first cause to root out.  

If you have believed that you are not lovable, you learned that belief from someone. That, someone, taught it to you by not loving you, or not knowing how to love you in the way that you needed to be loved. 

The first thing you have to understand and see is that every human being on earth was born lovable.  

When I say that we were born lovable, I am saying that it is our most natural state.  It is our most natural state because we are nothing but love on that day.  

The only thing that changes for us is what we begin to take on as we grew up.  More specifically, our perception in our minds about our lovability. And that perception that we gain affects how we feel about ourselves and how others treat us.

The good news is that you have the power to give yourself all that you need right now.  It is time for you to begin loving you in action. 

The following are core loving actions that you must begin taking.

• Practice self-compassion
• Practice self-forgiveness
• Practice self-kindness
• Practice self-honoring
• Practice good self-care

As you begin the practice of loving yourself, you have to become mindful of mindsets that likely exist in you right now.  

They are powerful contributors to the loneliness that you feel.

Negative mindset and victim mindset are very harmful friends who we must let go to stop being lonely, start being happy and start truly living our lives. 

Negative mindset and victim mindset are highly seductive and addictive while being hidden too quickly from the beholder’s view.

When you have a negative and victim mindset, you are like that of Odysiuss’s crew of men from the Greek mythology, who were charmed in the Aeaea island.  Like those men during the charmed state, you have no idea that your life is far from what you truly want.

To get free of the negative mindset that has been holding you back from your life in every way and causing the pain of loneliness, you can begin practicing a proactive mindset, what Carol Dweck of “Mindset,” calls, “Growth Mindset.” 

You will have to mindfully begin practicing the following action steps to gain a proactive mindset. 

• Begin gratitude practice
  • It is incredible how powerful grateful practice is. It is equally impressive how many people go without grateful practice without ever knowing the level of power this practice has on one’s life.
  • Doing daily, once a day is a good start, but it is only a start.  Life takes over, or rather, we human beings are creatures of habit, and emotional practices are equally as powerful.
  • As doing it once a day is a helpful beginning, if done only once a day, the rest of the day gets filled with the old way of running your emotional life or letting your emotional life run you.
  • The best practice is to do a gratitude practice first in the morning and the last thing before bed.  Then throughout the day, every time you pause for thought or a break, give thanks to something around you or in front of you, or something or someone that is in your life that you are grateful for(their wellbeing, what they mean to you, what they mean to their community, etc.)
• Focus on what you have the power to control and let go of what you cannot control
  • If you have no power to control the situation, then acknowledge that fact and then move your focus to what you can do to make things better for yourself. When you figure out what you can do, then take the action steps to make it better for yourself.
  • Taking the action steps to resolve your pain instantly empowers you.  You gain incredible insight into the possibilities of your power.  You realize just how much more powerful you are than what you thought or even knew.
  • You become more aware of yourself and what you are capable of.
  • You become more aware of your character and who you are in ways you had never really known before.
  • You get to see the power of change and your ability to change, and your ability to grow, learn and expand.
  • Learning all of these things about yourself gives you the knowledge you can do and manifests so much more than you had ever realized or known before, and this is one of the most amazing wonders of this universe that you could recognize.  It is truly the most amazing thing because you get to see just how powerful you are and how much you can do to change your world and make a positive dent in your world.  

Practice Hero’s mindset to lose victim mindset

If you have a victim mindset, it is because you likely were victimized at some time in your life, especially when you had little power to help yourself.  You didn’t have the power, knowledge, and skillsets at that time.  You could not see a way out at the time. 

You may have been picked on by your older siblings when you were little, and you were too small to defend yourself again that sibling.

You may have been beaten and starved by abusive caretakers.  You were too little to help yourself.

The critical part of all of this, no matter what has taken place in your life, is your present life’s happiness and fulfillment level.

It is also true that you can give yourself happiness and fulfillment, that which is your birthright.  

You can be and must be the master of your fate and captain of your soul.

There are excellent historical figures who faced victimizations and won the world by being a hero and not letting victimization take them over.  Just some of them were Victor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, and Epictetus.

The common factor amongst these people was that they used what challenged them, what gave them great pain, to make the very hero out of themselves.  They turned their pain into healing tools and made a powerful difference in our world.

Look for what you can gain from what happened to you, how you can grow, improve skills and knowledge, etc.

Look for how you can use what happened to you to help heal the world.

Take actions to learn and figure out your unique way to make a positive change.

When you do these things, you are a hero.  When you become a hero, you are no longer a victim.

When you are no longer a victim, you are who you were meant to be.

We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not.  Our actions and states of mind matter because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”  —  Ram Dass

The next step in overcoming the terrible plague of loneliness is to get connectted.

With the feeling of self-love and knowing that you are enough, leaving behind a negative mindset and victim mindset, you add to your growth and expansion by regular connection practice. 

When I say “connection,” I am not talking about connecting to other people in your life.  Not exactly. The connection that I am talking about, when you master it,  you will authentically connect to others as a side effect.

The connection that I am talking about is first and foremost to you, who you are, and your being.

How often do we move through our days, hours, and minutes and even seconds, disconnected from who we are?  Too many of us walk through our lives disconnected from who we indeed are.

We are too busy looking outward.

How could we feel anything but loneliness?

The answer is to be in the practice of being connected to ourselves. 

The most effective way to learn how to connect to ourselves is by Meditating.  One of my favorite methods is Emily Fletcher’s Zeva method. 

Another crucial thing you must do to connect with yourself is to be on your life path, do your life’s work.

“What hurts the hive, hurts the bee”  — Marcus Aurelius.

When Marcus Aurelius said, “What hurts the hive, hurts the bee,” in his, Meditation, he was talking about the imperative need that we all have to work to help one another and to be about making a positive difference in our world, that we are all bees, a part of a larger hive. 

We are all meant to be working toward the greater good.  

As a person who is in the practice of connecting to yourself, you become genuinely complete when you do just what it is you are here to do.  

You are here to do things that when you watch someone do them, something just feels right.  You get a jolt of pleasant good feelings in your brain.  

It feels natural if you are introduced to it right.  You want to do them even if no one paid you to do it.  

If you have no idea what you want to do, what your heart loves, then it is because a sequence of events in your life has established a disconnect from you and your life’s path. 

Discovering your life’s path by reconnecting with yourself is a worthy journey and a necessary journey if you want to be your best you.

Living your life fully, being fully in the moments, and giving all of these things, takes you on an opposite path from where loneliness dwells.  

You cannot be lonely in that state of being.