We all want to be successful, but more often than not, we never feel like we’ve actually achieved success. In fact, it’s common to look back on past achievements and feel like they weren’t as grande as you thought they would be.
That entire thought process can make the idea of future successes seem daunting and impossible, particularly if we’ve been feeling like we’ve been failing more than breathing lately.
There’s not much that we can control in our lives. However, we have the final say over one thing: ourselves. We are the ones calling the shots about us. This means that if we’re standing in our own way, which is often our biggest block to success, it’s completely within our power to change it and change our situation.
I’m going to walk you through several bad habits most people have that are keeping them from achieving their ultimate goals and creating success.
Sabotaging and hating on yourself.
There’s a reason why everyone is going wild hopping on the self-love and self-care bandwagon these days: because we are so deprived of it. We come from a society where your value is in your work and what you can do. When that’s the case, we rarely believe in our own inherent value and self-worth.
You are worthy, deserving, and lovable and you don’t need to do a damn thing to “earn” it. You already have it.
Every time you get down on yourself because you messed up or couldn’t make something work or got scared and backed away from your dreams, you short-changed yourself. Big time.
The way you think about yourself has everything to do with whether or not you will succeed. If you’re constantly thinking negative thoughts about yourself, you’re not going to even feel deserving of success and good things in the first place. If you replace those thoughts with positivity, kindness, and love, so many doors will open up to you and you will feel confident and capable about the journey.
You deserve good things. You deserve success. Be kind to yourself and work on allowing yourself to believe the words I just told you.
Comparing yourself to others.
We’ve all heard the saying “Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle”. Yet, we hardly ever listen to that advice. In a world that relies on instant gratification, we believe that if we put the effort in and we’re not seeing results right now, we’re never going to see them.
In reality, things take much more time to come to fruition than we allow. If you feel like things are moving too slow or there’s been too many wrong turns, keep going.
More often than not, success looks like a looong series of failures punctuated by “wow, that almost worked” here and there before hitting the ultimate sweet spot.
If we're standing in our own way, which is often our biggest block to success, it's completely within our power to change it and change our situation. Click To TweetWaiting for it to be perfect.
I’m guilty of being a perfectionist. Perfectionism gets a lot of praise, but it shouldn’t. There’s nothing interesting or fun about perfect. It’s stressful, unrealistic, and can just be downright depressing.
Stop waiting for whatever you’re working on to be “perfect”. Just do it. Part of getting the hang of anything is doing it, adjusting, doing it again, adjusting, and so on until you feel comfortable with the outcome.
There’s no way to go through that process and actually get there if you’re clinging to something being “perfect” first.
Getting stuck in a mindset of learned helplessness.
Can I tell you how many times I’ve heard a reader, a friend, or a loved one stressing over something when, had they just taken 30 seconds to look it up on Google or Youtube, an easy solution would’ve eradicated all that heartache? Too many times.
We live in an era where anything we could possibly want to know is right at our finger tips. Everything is solvable. Everything has a solution. Everything has an answer. You may not have the answer, but someone does.
Just because you don’t know the answer to a problem doesn’t mean you should tuck it in a corner and try to forget about it. Put some effort into finding the solution. Keep hunting until you get enough info to know what to do next. You don’t have to stay stuck; you just need to try a different method.
Fearing the “what ifs” and “what’s next”.
Ah, the big “Unknown”. It’s why the idea of death is so scary. Or committing to someone to the rest of your life by saying vows. Or having children and not knowing who they are before they’re ever even conceived. Fearing the unknown is the root of a lot of fears.
You may approach this goal and flop two dozen times before you start to get somewhere. You may attempt this project and get halfway through before you realize that you want to go a completely different direction. You may start down a path and want to make a U-turn.
And, guess what? Not only is all this normal, but you’re allowed to change your mind! That’s the great thing about life: if you don’t like where you’re heading, you can go a different way.
You’ve been at forks in the road before and you picked a direction to get to where you are now. You’ve made mistakes and recovered. You’ve changed your mind and it still went okay.
You have done everything that you’re currently fearing before. Don’t go down the rabbithole now because the situation looks different. You are absolutely capable of doing this and achieving these things.
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