6 Behaviors You’re Unaware of That are Holding You Back

Get rid of the iron ball chained to your feet before you climb the mountain.

About ten years ago, I went on vacation with my dad’s side of the family. Although most of the memories are kind of blurry, I remember one particular event as clear as day.

My dad and I bought a couple of tasty Croatian beers, sat down on a bench, looked at people passing and listened to their conversations for hours.

I’ve always been that way. I love to listen, watch, and observe. I love to ask questions. I love a good conversation.

I’ve been to 15 countries on five different continents. I’ve seen my fair share of people. And because I like to ask questions and listen to people’s answers, I know quite a lot about their lives and what makes them tick.

Do you know what baffles me most? A lot of them like to chain a big and heavy iron ball to their feet. And then they try to run a marathon or go for a swim. Not exactly the smartest thing to do.

Alright — the iron ball, the marathon, and the swim are all metaphorical. Nobody I know would jump into a lake with a weight chained to their feet (otherwise I’d have to do some serious restructuring in my circle of friends.)

But the behaviors and mindsets people often carry around with them are exactly that: a big, fat, iron ball chained to their feet, holding them back on their path through life.

The obvious question now is: Why don’t they take it off? Simple answer: They are not aware of it.

See, we humans have one built-in problem: We can only see the world through our own eyes. Have you ever put on colored glasses and seen the difference in the beginning, but after five minutes your eyes adjusted, and you didn’t even notice wearing them anymore? Just like that, we become blind to our own behaviors. We can’t see the iron ball chained to our feet.

What’s even worse is that while you can’t see them, your flaws are obvious to other people — but they don’t tell you, because they don’t want to be rude.

Enter: Me, the guy who is unapologetically honest and will tell you what you need to hear, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Mixing up Fault and Responsibility

I’ve already discussed this one in more depth, but it’s still the number one behavior that holds people back like a fishing net an unlucky mackerel.

Honest and straight to the point: Life is unfair. Things will happen that are not your fault but still mess you up. A stolen car, catching the flu, or not scoring your dream job because traffic was a mess and you were late for the interview. It sucks, but that’s life. The thing is, even if you’re not at fault, it’s still your responsibility to decide how you react to it. And there are two ways to do so.

One, you can complain about how life is unfair and it’s not your fault and yadda yadda yadda. It wasn’t your fault, fair point. You’ve all right to be pissed. But complaining won’t get you anywhere. The only thing you’ll do is waste your time and energy and cultivate a feeling of entitlement. Both will hold you back in life.

Two, you can cuss out whoever you think responsible for the sucky event and then move on. You alone are responsible for what you do with your life and that includes picking up the pieces and moving forward in spite of the curveball you’ve been thrown.

Let me ask you a question. Suppose life gave you a pleasant surprise, like a free meal because you are the 1000th customer or an unexpected job opportunity. Would you take it and make the best out of it or complain because it wasn’t your fault, so to speak?

Thought so. Stop complaining, get yourself together, and live your best life regardless of what happens.

Giving in to Your First Impulse

Don’t promise when you are happy, don’t reply when you are angry, and don’t decide when you are sad.

— Ziad K. Abdelnour

I bet that if you go back in your memories, there will be countless occasions in which five minutes of thinking could’ve saved you hours of headaches. Impulse shopping, going off at someone, buying Bitcoin when it was clearly a bubble, and agreeing to help someone moving although you had no spare time and a bad back.

The problem with impulse reactions is that they are largely based on emotions — you do what feels right in the moment. But what feels right in the moment often doesn’t feel right soon after, and sometimes isn’t the right thing to do at all.

A friend of mine is writing her thesis at the moment and has regular mail exchanges with her supervisor, who is — for the lack of better words — an absolute clown who’s full of himself. After she received an email from him, she was about to go off — not a smart idea since she has to work with him for another month and he is the one grading her. Fortunately, I could cool her down and convince her to at least wait a couple of hours before replying. By then, she had already blown off most of her steam.

Emotions are a great way to gauge how something makes us feel — but they are often terrible advisors when it comes to making decisions. Give yourself some time to think it over, wait for your rational brain to kick in, and decide on something that benefits you in the long run instead of biting you in the butt.

Looking for Excuses

If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.

— Jim Rohn

In my life, I’ve met quite a few people that I’d label “excuse-seekers”. You can usually spot them from a mile away. They want to start a business, but they don’t have the time, money, and the market is too saturated anyway. They’d love to lose weight, but their metabolism is too slow. They want to find a better job but the system is rigged and the big man wants to keep you small.

Look, Helen Keller became deaf and blind at the age of 19 months but still earned an arts degree and became an author and lecturer. Mind you that this was around the 1900s, when neither women’s rights nor support for people with disabilities were what they are today. And you’re going to plunk the chance to get your dream job down because you didn’t hear back from the ten applications you sent out? Come on.

You’d be surprised about what’s actually possible if you stop making excuses and get to work. And even if it doesn’t work out, you can say that you actually went and tried it — instead of surrounding yourself with a thick wall of shoulds, coulds, and woulds.

You can live life like a victim and look for reasons why you won’t succeed. However, instead of making excuses, I’d advise you to make things happen and believe in yourself. Because if you don’t do it, nobody will. Your choice.

Living in Fear of What Might Happen

In her book Top Five Regrets of the Dying, palliative nurse Bronnie Ware wrote about what people regret most when they are on their deathbed. Two out of the top five start with I wish I had the courage to…

They wished they had the courage to live a life true to themselves and the courage to express their feelings. People often don’t live the life they want because they are afraid of what others might think of them. They don’t express their feelings because that means they have to make themselves vulnerable and could get hurt.

Look, I get it. Fear can be a powerful emotion and you can’t just turn it off. In a lot of cases, it makes sense, like when you’re thinking about jumping from a huge cliff. But fear itself is rooted in caveman times, when it could make the difference between staying in your camp after sundown or getting eaten by a sabretooth tiger because you went out at night.

Nowadays, the outcomes are much less severe, but our fear is still the same. If you let it dictate your life, you deprive yourself of thousands of opportunities. So what if you make yourself a fool? So what if your idea doesn’t work out? So what if you confess your love and get rejected? Sure, that sh*t hurts — but you’re not going to die. You’ll only grow stronger in the process.

When you were a kid, you just did things without much thinking. If it worked out — great. If you face-planted, you cried for a while, got back up, and went back to playing.

But at one point in your life and the process of becoming an adult, your fear took over. And that’s alright, because as an adult you don’t have a parent watching out for you and stopping you from doing really stupid stuff, so you have to think for yourself.

But if you let your fear paralyze you, you’ll never be able to move forward.

Stop trying to avoid risks in life just so you can make it to death safely.

Thinking Short-Term

The famous Stanford Marshmallow Test had children choose between getting one marshmallow instantly, or two after about 15 minutes. Follow-up studies found that the children who were able to delay their gratification “tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures”.

This is a fancy way of measuring what everybody knows, but only few people act upon. To get big results and achieve what you want, you have to be able to delay gratification and think long term.

Thinking short-term often holds you back and makes you end up in the same place you started — or even worse. It only masks the symptoms, but doesn’t address the underlying cause. A crash diet will make you lose weight quickly, but because you don’t change your eating habits long-term, you’ll yoyo all that weight back onto your belly.

Anything you do can be seen as an investment in your life — you spend your time, money, and energy on something. Focusing on short-term gains will bite you in the butt in the long run.

Instead, do it like Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time. His strategy is focused on long term gains, which made him one of the richest people of all time.

Chasing Other People’s Definition of Success

It’s easy to get sucked into the image of success that mainstream society provides. Tons of money, a nice car, bleached teeth, influence, and status. Sure, these things are nice to have. And I don’t want you to abdicate all material and earthly pleasure and live like a hermit. At least I wouldn’t do that, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

People are quick to remind everyone of their individuality, their unique story and circumstances, and their own personality.

But they drop all sense of individuality and independent thought as soon as it comes to “being someone.” They want certain things because advertisements, media, and other people tell them that that’s what makes them happy.

If you never stop, take a step back and ask yourself what you really want from life, you’ll forever be chasing things you don’t even want. You’ll forever feel dissatisfied and unhappy, even if you get to them. You’ll feel like you’re making progress but in reality, you’re getting further away from where you want to be.

There is no point in running faster if you’re headed in the wrong direction.

Loosen the Chain One Link at a Time

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

— Leo Tolstoy

We are quick to point out what’s wrong with the world, society, politics, the “system”, or our next-door neighbor who never cleans up his dog’s poop.

I don’t blame you — you have worn your you-colored glasses for so long that by now, you’re blind to yourself, to your thinking, and to your behavior.

The problem is that even if you find out what’s holding you back, changing your behavior is a whole different animal. It has been ingrained in your head for years, so it will take a long time to rewire.

That’s why all I’m asking you to do is to pick the thing from the list that is most likely to hold you back and commit to working on it over the next four weeks. That’s all. One commitment, four weeks. Stick to it and stop holding back yourself.

Taking off the iron ball chained to your feet in one go might seem impossible. But what you can do is loosen the chain, one link at a time.

Now you know what you can do about your own behavior — but what about all the problems and worries that are external? If you want to get rid of a lot of them in one go, check this one out.

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