What’s Stopping You?

What's stopping you from reaching your true potential and achieving breakthrough success? Well more than likely ... you.

You've read that right. It's not the world conspiring against you. More than likely the limiting factor in your success is your mental conditioning. That's the reason you don't make the sale, get the job or earn the promotion.

Most people are held back by a lack of courage. I'm not talking about the climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro or bungee jumping off the Golden Gate bridge kind of courage. I'm talking about the everyday kind of courage. The courage to have the conversation, apply for the project or ask for the business.

Why aren't we more courageous? Most are afraid of failure. And so strong is this fear that we will go to great lengths to avoid it and unfortunately this keeps many from realizing their true potential.

Head Games

Most of us talk to ourselves. We have a running internal dialog. And many psychologists will tell you that this mental conversation we're having with ourselves is quite often negative.

Often it's inhibitive, "I can't" and other times it's imperative, "I have to" and then there's double whammy "I can't, but I have to." Who could thrive in such an environment? The answer is darn few.

The challenge here is to be cognizant of our mental state and the running internal dialog. And when we catch it being a negative, change it. Scientists say we can only hold one thought in our head at a time (although they also say our neurons are firing at some 250 miles per hour so you can have a range of quite divergent thoughts quite rapidly). So your thoughts may as well be positive.

If you catch yourself saying "I can't" of course you should obviously change that to "I can" as long as it truly is a task worth pursuing. You can do most of whatever you set out to do, you may just need to learn something, read something, or talk to someone first.

If you find yourself saying "I have to" try replacing that with "I want to" and see if that doesn't change your mood. And of course the alternative to both is "I'm not going to and I don't have to" and this will o

ften change your perspective as well.

Pointless Perfectionism

I know one thing more of us can reduce, me included, is the limited drive towards perfectionism. Look below at this frequently used, "hockey stick" chart. It shows that for most to get to about 80% effective really requires relatively low investment in terms of energy and effort. But the energy and effort required to get substantially above that is huge.