Self-doubt and negative thinking is pervasive in today’s connected society. While we shower others with encouragement and support, we often secretly hold ourselves back. Success and reaching for the stars is wonderful for other people, we think. Other people can be hero’s and heroins of any story they choose, but not us. Certainly not us. We are just the junior employee. The starving artist. The mentally underdeveloped. We were not created for anything great. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. We can be our biggest roadblock to success or our greatest champion if we give ourselves permission to succeed.
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Unlocking the Door to Success
The fairy tale often goes, “and then the prince rescued the princess from the castle.” Day-to-day we live out this fairy tale. At least, we try to.
We intuitively rely on someone else to come rescue us.
We are the princess, yet the castle and chains and moat and fierce dragon is our limiting beliefs.
The secret to unlocking the door, walking through, and having a fairy tale experience is giving ourselves permission.
We choose to let ourselves free from disbelief and mediocrity.
We choose to learn and grow.
We choose to develop new skills or to let go of old ones.
To do this, we must hold ourselves accountable.
Choose to Be Accountable to Yourself
If we don’t already hold ourselves accountable, there is no reason to invite someone else to do it for us.
But when it comes to holding ourselves accountable, our brain tends to go bonkers.
Accountability is nothing more than assessing the truth of a situation and responding appropriately.
In the publishing industry, writer’s block is a common nemesis.
Yet, successful and prolific author Seth Godin would ask us to show him our bad writing before accepting that we simply “have nothing to write.”
In our quest for perfection, we paralyze ourselves to do nothing. We wonder, “What if no one reads what we wrote?”
Rather than try and create, we wait for the prince to rescue us. We wait for someone to tell us to go ahead with this idea or that thought because it’s pure gold.
It’ll be the best. It must be shared.
Reality is very different.
The value of our creation comes only after we have done the creating. We’ll never know if an idea or project will amount to anything if we don’t give it a try.
To be more accountable, we have to assess how we’re doing.
To do that, we need to find time and space to be by ourselves.
Spend Time with Yourself
Spending time with ourselves is not the same as being alone.
Many people are alone all the time. Loneliness has become an epidemic, even though people are more connected than ever before in history.
To spend time with ourselves takes focus.
It takes mental clarity.
It takes intentional discretion on the thoughts or distractions we allow to fill our mind.
Many people can’t exist without distraction. Social media, entertainment, and stresses from life are everywhere. You may even know of someone (surely not yourself) who has to have their phone on them all the time. They become anxious without it.
When we truly set ourselves apart from everything going on around us, we can focus on what really matters.
We can consider how we are doing and if we are on the right path to reach our goals. But we can’t do that if we haven’t set any goals.
Set Goals for Yourself
Less than 3 percent of people write down their goals and fewer than 1 percent of people review their goals regularly.
People who set goals for themselves are 50 percent more likely to achieve their goals than people who don’t.
This seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Do you want to achieve your goals? Then show them to me.
Where are they? Where did you write them down and when was the last time you reviewed them?
The saying goes, you can have the best ship in the world but if you don’t know where you are going, you’ll just drift around.
Our natural inclination as human beings is to accept ambiguity.
We are afraid of specificity.
We run from identifying clear objectives for our lives. But then, that’s what got us into the spot we are in. That’s not what will get us to where we are going.
Give yourself permission to succeed by answering these questions on actual paper and be specific:
- What do I spend most of my time doing?
- What goal would I like to achieve 2 years from now?
- What steps can I take right now to begin working towards my goal?
- What self-limiting beliefs and actions do I have that are hindering me from reaching my goal?
- What can I spend more of my time doing that would help me reach my goal?
- Who has achieved this goal already that I could learn from?
- Will I give myself permission to succeed?
- What will I do when I reach my goal?
- What goal would I like to achieve after I achieve this goal?
To develop the right answers to these questions, you’ll need time with yourself.
Get rid of all the distractions. Grab a clean sheet of paper or notepad, a nice pen or pencil, and let yourself get lost in reflection. Write it all down.
Once you’ve written down your goals in a place of intentional solitude, it’s time to act.
You cannot set goals and then fail to act on them. You must do something. Even a slight change to your daily habits will give you tremendous momentum. But you must do something.
If your goal is to publish a book, you must write more. Write good stuff, bad stuff, and everything in between stuff. If you’re not writing enough, get rid of something that is holding you back.
Ditch the TV. Cancel the night out with friends. Wake up earlier or go to bed later. Guard your goal with feverish intensity and chip away at it.
This is all part of building your personal brand by holding yourself accountable.
Don’t rely on some prince charming to ask you how many words you’ve written this week.
Don’t wait for the wise old mage to ask you if you made it to the gym today.
Be your biggest champion!
Then, when you’re pushing yourself, invite others to join you. Not to hold you more accountable, but to enjoy life with you.
Build a network of like-minded people who love what you love and you’ll soon find that while you’re not relying on someone else to make you do what you ought, having others around makes doing what you ought that much more satisfying.
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