Life Is Happening For You, Not to You

A few years ago I was sitting in an office doing work I was good at but never loved, praying for a different path and wondering if it was ever going to come.

I was burnt out after seventeen years in the title industry. A career that paid the bills and funded my passion for horses and team roping but never once made me feel like I was doing what I was made to do. I prayed for change. I prayed to be able to make a difference. I waited. And for a long time, nothing seemed to move.

And then I had a huge win at the World Series of Team Roping in Las Vegas.

It changed everything. Not immediately, but It was the catalyst that gave me the confidence and the ability to walk away from a steady paycheck, a long-time career and step into exactly what I had been praying for. Looking back, I can see how every piece — the teaching background, the years of studying the mental game, the competitive experience, the faith — was being assembled quietly, on a timeline I couldn't see or control.

I could not have scripted it. But I can look back now and say with complete conviction: that was life happening for me, not to me.

THE LENS YOU DON'T KNOW YOU'RE WEARING

Most of us are walking around with a worldview we've never examined. A lens through which we interpret everything that happens — our results, our setbacks, our circumstances, our relationships. And that lens is either working for us or against us, whether we realize it or not.

The question is simple: do you see the world as a friend or a foe?

If your default is foe — if your first instinct when something goes wrong is why does this always happen to me — then every setback becomes evidence against you. Every hard season becomes confirmation that you're not good enough, not lucky enough, not meant for what you're working toward, and that life is just meant to be a grind.

But if your default is friend — if you can hold even a small belief that what's unfolding is shaping you for something — then the same setbacks become information. The same hard seasons become building material.

Same circumstances. Completely different experience.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY MEANS TO BELIEVE LIFE IS HAPPENING FOR YOU

I want to be honest about what this belief is and isn't.

It is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending hard things don't hurt or that disappointment isn't real. Believing life is happening for you doesn't require you to feel good about everything.

What it requires is staying open. Staying curious. Asking not why is this happening to me, but what is this making possible?

Those are not the same question. And they produce completely different answers.

PERSPECTIVE IS A TRAINED SKILL

Here's what the research on high performers consistently shows — the people who bounce back fastest from adversity are not the ones who never face hard things. They are the ones who have trained themselves to interpret hard things differently.

This is perspective as a skill, not a personality trait, and it is built through deliberate, consistent practice.

The practice looks like this. First, notice your default. When something goes wrong, what story do you immediately tell yourself? Just notice it without judgment. Second, reframe intentionally. Ask a different question — what can I learn from this, what is this making possible, what would I tell a friend in this situation? Third, do it again tomorrow. Perspective work is daily work. One reframe today, one shifted interpretation tomorrow. Over time that becomes your new default.

THE 3 OPP STRATEGY

One of my mentors, Dr. Cindra Kamphoff — high performance expert and author of Beyond Grit — teaches a tool called the 3 Opp Strategy that I think is one of the most practical applications of this principle I've come across.

The next time you face a setback, ask yourself: what are three opportunities in this?

Not one. Three. Because one is easy to dismiss. But when you push yourself to find three, your brain has to shift from threat mode to growth mode. You have to look at the situation from multiple angles. And in that process something opens up.

Maybe opportunity one is a lesson about what to do differently. Maybe opportunity two is evidence that you can handle hard things. Maybe opportunity three is simply that you showed up — and showing up when it's hard is always worth acknowledging.

The 3 Opp Strategy doesn't bypass the pain. It gives you something to do with it.

THE JAR

I want to leave you with one more thought — an idea a friend of a friend shared that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Imagine everyone in the world wrote their biggest problem on a piece of paper and dropped it into a jar. Every struggle, every loss, every health crisis — all of it in the jar. Now the lid comes off and you're invited to trade. Give up what you're carrying and take something else instead.

Would you reach in?

Most of us, if we're honest, would look for about thirty seconds and quietly put our own problem back. Because somewhere in that jar is a level of suffering that would make our current problem feel like a gift.

Real perspective doesn't come from telling yourself to be positive. It comes from genuinely reckoning with the truth that our circumstances — as hard as they are — are someone else's prayer request.

Life is happening for you. Even now. Even in this.

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