Dr. Shadé Zahrai

Shift the spotlight back to everything that you have developed over the course of your life and your career.

That reminds you, hey, maybe I do have certain capabilities and skills that I've earned that allow me this seat at the table.

So in the context of self-doubt, autonomy is the belief that you have a degree of control over your life.

You feel personally powerful.

Now, that doesn't mean you can control absolutely everything because not everything can be controlled, but you focus on what you can.

And because of that, you feel like you have more control.

Now, if you don't have a strong degree of autonomy, we see a number of common patterns here.

And if you're paying attention, if you're listening to this, you will probably be able to identify at least someone in your life who is struggling here.

We're less able to identify in ourselves because part of low autonomy is not taking ownership.

So, okay, let's look at these patterns.

The first one is if you struggle with autonomy, you complain a lot.

You complain about everything wrong in your life because it's easier to complain than to do something about it.

Because to do something about it requires you to take ownership.

And that is what low autonomy doesn't allow you to do.

So you complain.

Now, people don't realize when they complain about things, they are reliving the situation in vivid detail in their brain.

which is creating deeper, more efficient neural pathways, which makes complaining your default.

You basically become a negativity magnet because you notice more of the things to complain about.

So we get complaining is the first pattern.

The second one is blame.