In both instances, the choice is 100% up to you.

I recall the wisdom impacted by Socrates to the young conqueror Alexander the Great, when he was contemplating embarking on a journey to conquer all of Asia. The choice he was given was this - you can choose to live a short and glorious life, or a long and boring life. Alexander chose the former, and off he went with his army to come to an untimely death just one month sort of turning 33.

In every moment, there are two possibilities.

1. To be totally focused and absorbed by what is happening.

2. To focus on what is not happening, or what we think should or shouldn't be happening.

The difference is that the first option gives power to the event, making it ever lasting in our minds, and enriching our lives. It is a positive approach to life. To focus on what is missing, narrows our experience to a negative perspective, and almost guarantees to support the same situation recurring time and time again.

Since our bodies are programmed to respond faster to fear than to success, there is reason why we tend to take a negative view of most situations. Your key to a happier life is to bypass that natural response and train your mental processes to intercept your fear and replace it with the positive aspects of the event.

In other words, keep your focus on how to make your life better and more pleasureable, rather than how to reduce things that are painful.

Once you get stuck in the rut of focussing on the negative aspect, your natural tendency is to fix it or try to change everything. This just perpetuates the situation and ensures that more and more of your life is focused on that negative situation. You effectively expand your sphere of suffering, and most of us just love to pull others into that pool or misery with us.

Instead, make the conscious decision that you accept what has happened, you refuse to pay more than any direct result of the event, you will NOT empower it to expand into other areas of your life. Put it in a box. Close the lid on the box. And kick it right out of your life. It may sound a bit weird, but physically terminating an event or an emotion is a very powerful signal to the brain. For instance, write down the event. Put it in a jar and burn it - sip champagne whilst you watch and rejoice that this instance of your life is gone forever.

If you keep hanging on to painful events and past hurts, you will find that by age 40, your life is overwhelmed with baggage. You have positioned yourself into a rut of struggle, dispondency and a miserable future.

Fortunately, because you put yourself there, you can get yourself out. You just need a bigger jar and two bottles of champagne!!

But take action - your life is for you to control, not for your life to control you.

You can choose the way you live.