"The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours - it is an amazing journey - and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins." – Bob Moawad

The day you start taking responsibility for your own life is the day your life begins.

I take complete responsibility of my life, and everything in it. From the things I have, or don't have, to the people that are in it, or that are not, all the way down to the different situations that occur, or don't occur. I don't believe in coincidences and I don't believe in faith. I make my life; I get what I want and what I believe I should have and nothing less.

Being born and brought up in Sweden, I've always been surrounded by safety nets and I was forced in a young age to start using them. After a while I knew how to take advantage of them, which in some ways led me to not having to take total responsibility of myself and my life. If I f***ed up I would always land on something, if not soft, than semi-soft. That led me to a special kind of laziness. I mean, why work for what I really wanted when I could just, more or less, sit back and have a comfortable enough life without any real effort. It never made me feel good, or worthy of a good life.

And then I moved abroad, and all of a sudden things were different. All of a sudden I needed to be responsible for everything in my life. Now, you would think that it would be difficult and hard, but on the contrary; I loved it! For the first time in my adult life I was in control of how my life was and would be and it was a freeing feeling. If something went wrong it was all my fault, or my responsibility to make it right. If something went right it was all my doing!
I did something right! And I can honestly say that it was a new beginning. Sweden is great because they have all those safety nets, but too many people never learn that they themselves are responsible for their lives and nobody else. I think it's sad and I think it is one of the reasons why Swedish people are so unhappy, because a lot of them are. People need to be in charge of their own lives to be happy.

Today I am a very happy person, who likes to be in control of my life. I've chosen every single part of it, for myself because I wanted it. The feeling is liberating. I wish every person in the world will get to feel it some day, because once they've felt it they want to remain in it.

So I've got a question for you; are you responsible for your own life? Are you taking responsibilty for your own happiness and for your dreams? If not, try to answer this question; why? And what can you do to change it?

Love Carina

“Quality begins on the inside – and then works its way out” - Bob Moawad.

This quote tells a lot about who I am, because this is a strong belief of mine. It doesn’t matter how much money, time or effort you spend on your outside, if you don’t work at least as much on your inside it is all done for nothing. And if you do work on your inside you will find that you don’t have to spend, by far, as much money and time on your outside. Now, when I say work on your inside I mean all of it, your feelings, thoughts and health. Mind, soul and body. The whole package. Because it all has to be in abundance, you can’t leave one part of you out. If you do, you will never be completely happy. And to be completely happy is what this blog, and my life, is all about. Inside and out!

Working on your inside, to me, means to get to know yourself. To know what you love, so you can choose those things to be in your life. To know what you don’t like, so you can choose to keep them out of your life. It is about knowing what makes you smile and make use of those things when you need them the most. It is about loving yourself for exactly who you are. It is about changing the things about you and your life that you don’t like. It is also about getting to know and love your physical body. To learn what makes you feel good, what to eat, how to exercise, how much you need to sleep and so on. In short, it is about taking responsibility for you.

This isn’t something that happens over night, quite the opposite. This is something that will take you your whole life. There is always something you find you need to work on or change, because you change and your circumstances change. This is the absolute beauty of life, to me, because it gives my life a life long meaning.