In this and coming posts I simplified my experiences with clients, friends and relatives and put them into three categories describing completely different personalities and behaviour. Some people will find all the statements within the category applying to them, some will find only some of the traits describing who they are.
No matter how different people may be, they still roughly fall into one particular category. So read this and coming posts and find out which category is likely to apply to you and whether it’s a good category to fall into. Remember however that you are not bound to one category for the rest of your life – you can easily change it by changing the way you think and behave.
In this post I will describe the category that is the most unfortunate to find yourself in. I call people who fall into this category voluntary strugglers.
Voluntary strugglers form the biggest part of the population. They are the people who go to work although they hate what they do and complain how hard their life is. They consider themselves fair and deserving more than they have. They have strong beliefs about life and they find it hard to be tolerant of people with different beliefs.
They cannot make the connection between what they think about and what manifests in their life. Anything that they cannot physically see seems non-existent to them, unless, of course, they were grown up with other beliefs (such as a belief in God). They are not aware of what kind of thoughts they have in their heads therefore the events that occur in their lives seem completely random to them.
Most of them are pessimistic
From my experience, most of the voluntary strugglers are pessimists. Those that are optimists, however, are not entirely voluntary strugglers because they acknowledge the power of faith and hope. For those that are pessimists life is hardest, because they only interpret the world through their five senses obscured by their negative beliefs and make judgements about their future from what they see in the physical reality.
They react to external circumstances
Voluntary strugglers are affected by what’s happening around them, so if something negative happens to them, their mood goes down and if something positive happens, they become happy. For voluntary strugglers the title of this paragraph seems confusing to say the least since they think that they are supposed to react to external circumstances. This is, however, not the case.
When you ask voluntary strugglers how they become happy or sad, they always point to something outside themselves. The external circumstances always cause them to feel in a certain way. They never experience internal enthusiasm that is simply caused by who they are. I, for example, sometimes wake up extremely happy – for no reason whatsoever. The day can be gray and it may be raining, nothing special happened the day before, there is nothing new that I can be excited about, yet I cannot contain the happiness that I feel. For voluntary strugglers this seems simply impossible.
And it gets even better. When you try to explain that their mood doesn’t have to depend on external circumstances, they have a hard time understanding that and some even think that you are out of your mind for saying things like that. Try it yourself – try to explain this to a voluntary struggler and see how she/he responds to you.
They identify with their beliefs
Voluntary strugglers have very strong beliefs about life. They argue with people who have opposing beliefs and never realize that their beliefs might be false. This never crosses their minds and therefore their life is always the same (because their beliefs stay the same).
If someone disagrees with them, they take it as a personal attack rather than understanding that this is an attack on their beliefs. So they feel the need to be defensive and therefore are often involved in arguments. Some don’t even comprehend that it’s possible to form relationships with people free of any kind of disagreement. Such perception has a lot to do with the ego which expands whenever the person feels the need to attack someone else (either verbally or physically).
They picture themselves as victims
Voluntary strugglers are utterly convinced that events in the world are random and that only “the chosen ones” get a lucky break and the rest of the world has to struggle. They accept this as a fact of life and learn to deal with that however unfair it seems to them.
One of my friends is a perfect example of a person painting herself as a victim. Once I went abroad with her and we stayed in the same hotel room. Her work colleague called and she started complaining how unfairly she is treated at work and that she is supposed to be promoted for the quality of work she does. She was complaining this way for good ten minutes failing to realize that depicting herself as a victim is the worst way to have any kind of positive change in life. It goes without saying, that was the last time we went abroad together:) (For those who are new to my blog, I avoid negative people at all costs:)
They work hard but achieve little
Most voluntary strugglers are caught up in this horrible struggle loop. They work really hard but the results are insignificant, so they work even harder, but still nothing changes. So they get frustrated with their situation for a while but then they sigh and continue working hard with the acceptance that they were just not born under a lucky star. Such loop usually continues till they die. They never free themselves from this voluntary struggle because they don’t seek a way out – they just think that this is how life is supposed to be.
They think that external circumstances have power over them
Because they don’t understand that they create their reality, they blame external circumstances for what happens to them. They think that they don’t achieve much because of the place they were born in, their nationality, the government, the people that try to keep them down – you name it. They give so much power to the external circumstances that they indeed become powerless over them.
Little do they know that giving the power to the external things is the worst thing they can do to themselves. This alone can and do lead people to depression and even suicide. Depression is nothing more than the feeling of being completely powerless over things that happen to you and the situation you are in.
They focus on problems and therefore create more of them
Instead of learning from problems they experience, voluntary strugglers complain about them and focus on how bad the problems are. This is not productive at all and creates more problems as a result. So they fail to see the valuable lessons that the problems teach them and are likely to give up whatever they do when problems cross their path.
The destiny of voluntary strugglers
Most people who are voluntary strugglers will retire without any significant savings, regret not doing the things that they had the chance to, realize that the retirement made them even more miserable than they were and so they will find enjoyment in remembering the good old days that didn’t look that good when they where present.
In summary, life is really hard for voluntary strugglers. I know that because I was in all three categories and for the longest time I was a voluntary struggler. Life seems really unfair to such people. You feel as though you don’t have any power to change your situation and that causes you to constantly worry about your future and feel insecure. This is definitely the worst category to find yourself in.
In the next couple of days I’m going to write about the second category, which is a much better one to be in. The third category, however, is the best one. So read the coming posts and find out which category you belong to and if you’re not happy with where you find yourself in, simply adapt the traits of the category that is the most pleasing to you.
Thank you for visiting my site. My name is Simona Rich and my purpose in life is to help you reconnect with your core and create a life of your own design. I can help you do this with my coaching and articles. 
So true. Almost all my friends are voluntary strugglers. I tried to help but they think I talk nonsense. How can I make them see that life doesn’t have to be this way?
Some of them will never understand that no matter how hard you try to explain. People can only change when they want to change.
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I get it now. Thanks:)
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finally, I found this post again. You have few useful tips for my school project. This time, I won’t forget to bookmark it.
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I wonder how voluntary strugglers can’t understand the ‘Be happy over hate’ concept sometimes :O
I never knew there was a category for them lol :]
When you coach a lot of people, you start to see patterns:) But that doesn’t mean that all people are the same, just some have common traits.
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