How you organise your mind has a great bearing on your success in life. Whether you think so or not, you’re probably harbouring some limiting ideas, beliefs and attitudes which hold you back in some ways from the life you ultimately want to live. But what are they and how can you route them out to live to your fullest potential?
Daily Habits
A daily habit isn’t a limitation unless it doesn’t align with your long term goals. If your daily habits are eating ice cream and watching TV, but you want to build a lifestyle of freedom and wealth, your habits aren’t aligned with your routine.
What daily habits bring you closer to your goals, and which one take you further away? Daily habits are powerful over time. Whether you exercise on a daily basis or not, the results in 10 years time will be a testimony to your ‘deserving’ of health, fitness, wealth or any other thing in life you care for. If you want to attain something in life, make it part of your daily habits.
If your daily habits aren’t bringing you happiness, or bringing you closer to your goals, you need to spend some time thinking about what’s really important to you in life. Small daily action steps should be a part of the outcomes you want to attain over a longer period of time.
Entitlement
Having an entitlement attitude means you expect something without necessarily earning it. Unless you have been handed a huge inheritance, or don’t need to work for some reason, entitlement can hold you back because you don’t believe you need to work hard for whatever it is you’re aiming for. You just believe you ‘deserve’ it, without merit. It’s a dangerous belief system to have because if can undermine a lot of good intention.
Check whether you have some entitlement attitudes if you ever expect more than you actually receive for some reason. In truth, no-one deserves any more than they actually get. Some things come easy and other things take a huge amount of work. Feeling deserving can cut you off from holding yourself accountable and going for the things you want in life by taking positive action.
Procrastination
If you’re struggling to get something you want in life, procrastination is a big problem when building momentum. Unless you decide on a direction, indecision will halt progress. Perhaps you haven’t decided on your direction yet? Maybe you’re waiting for the right moment to act, or the right opportunity?
Guess what, time is still passing. Indecision is costing you precious time. Unless you make a choice to go for something in life, things will remain pretty much as they are now! Procrastination comes from doubt, fear and uncertainty. Sometimes imperfect action is better than perfect inaction! Procrastination can steal your life away little by little. Take action and fear falls away.
‘Victim’ Mode
Are you a victim? Do you need to justify yourself to people constantly? Are you always looking for someone to follow? If you’ve fallen into victim mode, you could stuck in a poor me ‘control drama’. Control dramas like ‘poor me’ stem from childhood where we receive energy from others in the form of love, support and consolation.
The trouble is, as we mature, it doesn’t work very well as a tactic. We need to learn new strategies to get what we want in life. As a victim, you become disempowered without someone else to look to for support. We can all be victims in certain situations. In what areas of your life are you looking to others, rather than finding solutions for yourself and becoming more empowered? Where are you a victim and where are you empowered?
The Past
Are you ‘stuck in your head’? Do you re-run scenarios from the past over and over? Living in the past isn’t an uncommon scenario. Everyone can fall into this ‘loop’ from time to time. The problem arises when it becomes a habit and takes over. To move forwards in life you need to have a positive outlook of the future and enjoy what you’re doing in the present. Living old painful scenarios from the past can be a major roadblock to your future success.
Take some time to look at how you are thinking. Are you predominantly thinking from the perspective of regret, loss and inadequacy? If so you need to stop. Notice what triggers bad feelings and start a gratitude diary to shift your focus from the negative to more positive things in your life. It’s difficult to create joy and happiness out of misery and pain!
Fear Of Success
There’s another reason people fall short of their truest potential and it’s called the ‘upper limit’ problem. Where do you place the ceiling on what you can accomplish? What unconscious barriers hold you from more health, wealth, happiness and freedom? At what point is it time to dwell on past failures, remain humble and reduce success?
Why would anyone think this way and stop their potential? Well, this can happen for a number of reasons. Perhaps we don’t feel deserving, we don’t want to outshine a sibling, overtake our parents’ success or we fear the implications of a large success. What about larger tax bills, others wanting handouts, more choices and more problems? All these could be unconscious reasons lurking in your mind which subtly confine your life to one which is much less than you can achieve. Maybe if you had more money, people would envy you. Perhaps you’d lose friendships or maybe you have some religious beliefs around money which hold you back:
“(Love of) money is the route of all evil”, “Rich people are greedy”, “money isn’t important” etc. Whatever these inner beliefs are you can put money on the fact that they are holding you back!
Apathy – Why Bother?
There’s another blocker to success and it’s apathy. Apathy is that part of your mind which says “why bother”, it won’t make any difference anyway. Or, “whatever I do, I won’t make it, so I won’t bother”. Apathy is a subtle undercurrent of personality which can creep in if you’re not vigilant of your thoughts. Like Napoleon Hill says in his book Think and Grow Rich “The unconscious mind is a fertile garden spot in which weeds will grow in abundance if seeds of a more desirable crop are not sewn therein”.
He further states that although we have the ability to control the thoughts which reach the subconscious mind, and deliver the ‘fruits’ of a like nature, most people do not control these thoughts but allow “weeds to grow”. Apathy is one of the “weeds” which can destroy the ‘crop’ of success. So next time you catch yourself thinking “why bother” or “this will amount to nothing” stop and notice the “seeds” you are sowing for your future!
Lack Of Focus/Purpose
It’s hard to become successful at anything without first identifying what it is you love. Without a healthy passion for something, it’s hard to maintain focus for long enough to make it a successful pursuit. Lack of focus is a bit like procrastination.
Without a strong intent driven action plan, success is hard to achieve, even with a plan and a goal. A good way to find your purpose is to write down some goals which are desirable and achievable given your current circumstance. As you take steps towards simple attainable goals, you learn more about yourself on the journey.
With growing confidence in yourself, you can take larger steps towards loftier goals and achievements. One of the best books I’ve read on achieving and setting goals is Stuart Lichtman’s “How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast“. In it, he breaks down his cybernetic transposition technique and delivers some basic steps towards aligning your goals with your desires and level of self belief. Ultimately, you can’t attain a goal if you
- Don’t want it enough
- Don’t believe it’s possible
Setting goals with these things in mind is therefore pretty important to its attainment. Stuart Lichtman delivers a strategy for setting goals which allows you to align all parts of the brain towards their attainment. Many don’t fulfil their goals simply because the competing parts of the mind are going in different directions.
No Self Belief
Yes of course we can’t leave out self belief. Self belief is so important for success and the attainment of goals of any kind. Wherever you stand in the self belief “camp” will often determine your resolve to attain your goal and purpose in life.
Self belief needs to be aligned with a purpose too which is greater than your current circumstances. Without it, you will easily become dissuaded and put off, because something is too hard, or you don’t want it enough. With self belief, no mountain is too high to climb.
You can have self belief, but lack direction. So you need both to succeed at something worthwhile. Self image is a big part of self belief. Read Maxwell Maltz’s PsychoCybernetics.
Desire & Expectation
In Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, he talks about two powerful forces which when aligned form an unstoppable motivation to achieve. They are desire and expectation. Desires are the ‘surface’ wants and wishes which we usually are conscious of. Expectation is what we believe we are worth or expect to get. So, if our desires are not the same as our expectations, we are creating something we don’t want. “Don’t desire something you don’t expect, or expect something you don’t desire” – Napoleon Hill.
If the very thing you really want in life is something you don’t believe you can have, you can either change your expectation or focus on attaining something which is in more alignment to who you are. Without both desire and expectation working together, one can counteract the other. Momentum is lost in attaining your goals. When both are in alignment, you can achieve much more far more quickly and easily.
Stuart Lichtman’s book is a good resource if you’re struggling to align your desires and expectations.