We can all do great things if we maintain a positive belief in ourselves and what we are doing.
Understanding what lies ahead is important to being successful in life.
Let’s face it, if you’re not prepared for the journey, then the likelihood is you’re going struggle to stay on track to achieve your goals.
There are 4 key obstacles you need to overcome when driving yourself to success.
- Fear
Fear is a primitive human emotion that we all experience regularly. It is an organic state of mind, an instinct we use to keep us safe from threats. Our brain is so complex that it has this capacity of alertness that assesses everything in our environment to tell us whether we are in a threatening situation or are safe.
It’s that assessment that drives fear.
I was once flying from Honolulu to Minneapolis and I was sat next to a lady who was terrified of the plane crashing. The odds of you dying in an airplane crash are 1 in 11 million, but the odds of you dying in a car crash are 1 in 5000. Air travel is one of the safest methods of transport and despite her knowing this, her fear was emotionally paralyzing, she was so stressed out that she couldn’t move in her seat.
Fear can be real and crippling. It can best each and every one of us. Everyone has their fears in life, fears they won’t be successful and fears that they can’t provide for their families. But fear can dictate the actions we make and can cause inaction too. It causes the flight, fight, or freeze mentality and we need to get to the root of it and fight right when we feel fear or anxiety.
Talk about your fears. Fight them right when you feel them and don’t put them off whether you think they are rational or irrational. Have the courage to talk and overcome what scares you and you will definitely be one step closer to being more successful in life.
- Limiting Beliefs
“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I can believe that I can do it, I will surely acquire the capacity to do it” – Mahatma Gandhi.
Our beliefs are the lenses we see and interpret the world through. They help us build ideas, develop values, and form an attitude towards life.
But beliefs aren’t always good things.
Lottery winners are more likely to go bankrupt in three to five years than the average American.
Why?
Because they did not earn the money. Most lottery winners experience discord between their self-image and what they are now challenged to believe about their new wealth. This discord, or perhaps even shock to the system, causes them to unconsciously self-sabotage and self-destruct, to bring them back into alignment. These are their limiting beliefs.
Until you change your limiting beliefs, you will continue to repeat the patterns that are holding you back. Once you move away from thinking “I can’t do this,” to thinking “Yeah, I’m going to nail this so I can become better” then you’ll start to see your life get a whole lot better.
You need to ask yourself, what am I doing to change my limiting beliefs to get me where I need to be? It takes a while to change your limiting beliefs and get accustomed to this, but once you get there you’ll start to see yourself becoming way more successful.
- Negative Mindset
It’s natural to experience ups and downs. Everyone goes through times of negativity. Sometimes it’s healthy and necessary to be negative as it brings us back to reality and grounds us.
Other times we can be overly negative and dwell too much on the things that bring us down and this is what’s known as the negativity bias. This can often be a very bad thing.
If we’re always focusing on the bad and have a morbid outlook on life, we’ll never be able to enjoy the good stuff. Fear and anxiety will rule your world and will turn your naturally healthy mind into a clouded wasteland of sorrow. Sure we’re hardwired to be negative, but not all the time!
A clouded mind hinders your ability to focus on what you want to achieve, it prevents you from realizing your goals, engaging with others, and most importantly leads to inaction.
Positivity allows us to see and take on new opportunities and when looking to be successful in business. You need to overcome your negative energies and become an optimist to inspire and push you to get out there and grasp those opportunities.
- Disempowering Habits
We all like saving time and energy. We often find ourselves doing this by creating habits. Some habits can empower and elevate us, while other habits can seriously mess with our productivity and can produce an unhealthy mindset and a destructive lifestyle.
For me, changing my habits changed my life. Adopting the mentality of changing one small thing a day may not seem like a big lifestyle change, but doing it every single day for a series of weeks is the difference between who you are now and what you could have been.
What matters is maintaining good habits and building up those patterns slowly over a period of time. It’s not a race or a rush to get to where you need to be, its a work in progress. Success is the product of changing small things slowly and taking baby steps to start out with.
It’s all about focusing on your end direction and less about your current location. The more you do that the more likely you are to change and get rid of your limiting beliefs!
Two Personalities, One Goal.
Everyone has two personalities, one is a positive personality and the other is a negative personality.
To achieve our goal of becoming successful, we have to ask ourselves, which one are we feeding?
Feeding our negative personality by not talking about our fears and anxieties, maintaining negative limiting beliefs, and not changing and getting out of bad habits will not lead us to success.
We can all do great things if we maintain a positive belief in ourselves and what we are doing.
George Washington believed his heavily underresourced group of soldiers could win against a far more equipped British army, and they did. Thomas Edison believed, against popular opinion, he could use electricity to make light, and he did. The Wright brothers believed they could make an airplane and against the odds, and they did.
The strong, the great, and the successful have all believed they could achieve and do something remarkable.
As you start your journey to success, believe in something positive, be the optimist, and focus on overcoming fear and those limiting beliefs in the back of your mind.
You’ll also still need to remember to take action.
Baby steps lead to giant movements, so start making small but good changes to your lifestyle, and build them up as habits that keep you on track to achieve your overarching goals.
