You have the ability to rewrite the story of your life as it’s happening with the choices you make.

One thing that’s critical to changing the outcome of your future is to identify which stories keep you from taking action on something you know you should do.

Do you find that you question your choices, once a week, once a day? Maybe you wake up, go to work, know you should be doing something different but you’re not sure what it is. The passage of time and inertia have an effect on your ability to be decisive as well.

You need to honestly question yourself in order to truly see where your vulnerabilities lie. Then can you start to make a plan that’s outside the comfort zone that brought you to the vulnerably position you are in.

What is the story you tell yourself about how long your retirement savings will last?

No one can predict exactly how long you’ll live. We also can’t predict exact future economic conditions, such as inflation. We don’t really have control over those things, but we do have control over our current finances and what we do with them. We control how much we can add to our savings over the next 5 to 10 years.

Maybe you’re already pilfering your savings for living expenses. So instead of assuming you’ll retire at 60 from your company, why not assume you won’t and instead come up with a plan to replace that income and add even more to it?

Here’s where you get to rewrite part of your story.

It’s possible to decrease your debt and monthly overhead and add to your retirement savings by taking a hard, objective look at your expenses. You can use your debt as permission to restructure and minimize your monthly overhead.

You can also use your retirement fund as permission to venture in to entrepreneurship. Yes, you’re getting older and maybe you don’t feel like starting something new, but it’s never been easier to start an online business on the side that brings you regular monthly income. And your management and business experience is itself a languishing asset that can be leveraged to make you a lot of money.

How can your story about your income and savings be improved?

What is the story you tell yourself when you think about job security?

Maybe you feel your position is tenable indefinitely and you won’t be affected. You made it past the first cut because of your senior position and you tell yourself you’re safe.

Thinking like this actually keeps you from taking action to relive your stress. You still go through the process of worrying about what would happen to you and your family in the case of prolonged unemployment, but because you convince yourself everything is OK today, you talk yourself into thinking that tomorrow will be fine too.

When you rewrite this part of your story, this all changes.

You decide you’re not OK and you’re determined to do something about it. It’s time to dust off your CV and start touching base with contacts in your industry. You can go outside your network and seek new contacts.

These things allow you to start formulating and implementing your Plan B. You work a little harder to get your name mentioned in conjunction with your expertise. What’s great is you’re actually creating an alternative path to travel that you engineer and control.

Give yourself some credit. You have more courage than you think, and just by starting a dialogue with yourself you have the ability to start rewriting your story.

How can your story about your job security be improved?

You can greatly increase your resiliency against difficulty. Half the game is mental and it greatly depends on the story you tell yourself.