subject: How To Remove The Blocks To Your Success [print this page] How to Remove the Blocks To Your Success
You are happy when you are making progress. You make progress when the time, energy, effort you expend leads to results you want.
You get in your own way when your efforts do not have a return on investment, or even a negative ROI, like when you are disappointed, beat yourself up, or get resentful of others for whom it looks so easy.
When you don't have core confidence, your time, energy, and attention will automatically go towards getting confident instead of going towards doing work effectively.
Here are 3 examples.
1) Let's say you don't think you are 'smart enough'. Even if you are given a referral to fantastic new client or encouraged to consider a stretch position, you will prioritize your need to hide or not expose yourself and you won't follow up. (My all-time favorite example of this came from a client who was a financial advisor and never followed up on a personal referral to Jack Welch! I'll save my own story of turning down an invite to share my research at the White House for a future email;-)
2) If you are a perfectionist, you will make yourself and your employees/assistant do a lot of re-work until it matches your perfect idea of a deliverable. You will do this because you are afraid of being blamed for a possible mistake. A lot of time and grinding, wasted effort is spent in order for you to prevent feeling disapproved of by others.
3) If you procrastinate on doing some big initiative in your life (like change your career, write a book, etc) you spend your time worrying about what will happen if you don't succeed. You worry that you will confirm your doubts about yourself ('see, I really don't have what it takes') or that other people will judge you as a failure. In order to prevent this bursting of your bubble, you'll procrastinate. The time you could be spending 'going for it' you are instead spending on managing that doubt.
Look at the areas of your life where you are aggravated that you are not getting a return on the time you are spending. Spend some time jotting down your thoughts about how your efforts are really more about trying to make yourself feel approved of or trying to prevent other from people disapproving of you.
Name 1-3 activities you'd be spending your time on if you removed your concern about your worth or your ability, and instead just focused on the activities that will help you feel you've made progress. For example, what if you didn't spend time worrying about what everyone else was going to think about your work this week and just tried to enjoy the process of coming up with your thoughts. What if you didn't evaluate your performance this week as 'good' (meaning you are 'enough', worthy, and lovable) or 'bad' (you are a loser, you better be worried about your future) and instead you just focused on done is better than perfect.
What if you spent your time asking yourself, 'what return am I going to get on the time I'm spending now'?
