6 Stinging Truths To Consider If You Haven’t Found Success In Life
You could be in your own way
It feels hopeless. You set goals, work your ass off, buy into every theory about personal success from popular gurus, and still, nothing seems to work.
This is the plight of those seeking to make something of themselves and hoping to find the right person to show them the “roadmap”.
As if it were that simple.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell contends that most people tend to give up just before they are about to experience their breakthrough.
Maddening isn’t it?
There are some very basic truths on why some people never quite get there.
It isn’t enough to want something, need it desperately, or think positively about how it is going to happen. It takes more.
It may even take an attitude adjustment and a hard look in the mirror.
You may be in your own way.
Here are a few success blockers that may help you determine if you’re the reason.
You have a negative bias
We are naturally inclined to remember the negative situations in our lives more than the positive ones.
A negative first impression will always trump a positive one.
If you have a negative bias about your success, one failed effort without immediate results may deem your entire project a failure. If you get one negative comment, it drowns out all others leading you to question the viability of your work.
Rick Hanson, professor at Berkely University of California states that
“The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.”
But even though negativity is our default setting there are ways to override it.
How to overcome this: Focus on what matters to you, your personal core values, and work to appreciate those things.
When you can “flood” your thoughts with positive experiences and focus on what is good in your life, you can begin to break the pattern of negativity being your “go-to” response for every situation.
You have a story
We have a personal attachment to the story we have about our lives. Good or bad, it becomes the foundation for everything we do. Some common stories are things like:
- I never catch a break
- My life has just been harder than most people
- I’m too young/too old/not smart enough
- No one wants anything from me/I don’t matter
Of course, any of these stories can seriously limit your chances for success because you’re trying to build on a wobbly and unstable foundation. You have to get right with yourself and work like hell to rewrite your story.
How to overcome this: According to Tony Robbins, here are the main steps to rewriting your personal story:
- Examine your habits Instead of focusing on what you want to change, turn your attention to the bad habit or habits that led you to want to change yourself. Is sleeping in and being late for work keeping you from a promotion? Is your late-night snacking habit leading you to be overweight?
- Practice every day Once you know what your new healthy habits are, practice them every single day — no matter what. Have a backup plan in case circumstances get in the way of your new habits and don’t allow yourself to cut corners.
- Focus on self-reflection One of the habits that led you to want to change your life around was not facing reality. Focus on realistic self-reflection throughout your journey and, when needed, ask those you trust for their perspective.
- Surround yourself with good people Spend time with good people who love you and you will develop a natural support system for your new habits so you are able to rewrite your story in a nurturing environment.
- Keep taking risks If you want to learn how to change your life, you cannot stay in your comfort zone. You need to take risks until you get comfortable with those risks — then take more. The more you push yourself, the easier it will become to rewrite your story and transform your life.
You’re unrealistic
Things take time and persistence. Not just for you, but for everyone. You cannot compare your situation now to someone else's when they have been working at it for decades.
While it’s great to set high expectations for yourself for inspiration and motivation, you may also believe that if you don’t have them, you won’t achieve anything at all.
You’re being too hard on yourself.
Setting unrealistic expectations for yourself can shut you down at the first sign of something getting off track. That can steer you in the wrong direction, simply because what you thought should be true, actually isn’t.
How to overcome this: Focus on how you feel when you “disappoint yourself” and face it with humor and flexibility.
Pay attention at that moment to how your expectation could have been a little too much.
“So I’m not perfect at giving a presentation. I’ll guess I’ll have to tell my mom I’m not perfect after all. I hope she’ll understand”. Humor yourself.
“Maybe getting the entire project done in one week was the wrong call. I think I should focus on doing it right, not fast.”
Check yourself every now and then, allow yourself to laugh, and remain flexible if you want to keep your goals realistic.
You’re inconsistent
You can’t expect to achieve success at anything in life if you’re sporadic with your efforts. This is a no-brainer.
Consistency is nothing more than regularly focusing on the task at hand while maintaining your long-term vision.
It’s about repeating your habits over and over, paying attention to the feedback or responses you get, and then adjusting those tasks to keep you on track to your goal.
You can easily become inconsistent because of distractions or lack of commitment to your long-term goal.
How to overcome this: In order to remain consistent, there are a couple of easy tools you can use.
- Use reminders- Intentionally blocking off time to repeat your new efforts will help keep you focused on autopilot. Set reminders and commit to sticking to what is on your schedule.
- Celebrate little milestones-If you really want to stay on task, make every win something to celebrate. Share your goals with others to report back, write about it, anything to give you an accountability partner to celebrate with will help. Rewarded behaviors have a higher probability of being repeated.
- Don’t quit if you mess up-Anything that you deem as a mistake should simply be acknowledged and corrected. Don’t let one or two small setbacks give you permission to chuck all your work. Examine what went wrong, and take steps to correct and adapt.
You don’t have the passion
Just like the idea that people who love their job don’t ever feel like it’s work, if you don’t have a passion for your project, you won’t keep up with it.
Maybe you think you are passionate about it because you think it will give you quick money, fame, or attention, but if you’re working on something for those reasons, you won’t stick with it.
There’s no chance of success when you don’t feel passionate about what you’re doing.
How to overcome this: Easy. Realize your true passions by getting clear with your own personal core values. These can’t be borrowed or copied from anyone else, they are uniquely yours.
There are a few tips on how to hone in on your true passions:
- Look at what you do in your free time. This can be a teller of a passion. Is it something that you can build into your life in a bigger way? Can you talk about it, teach it, incorporate it into something you already do?
- Remember your favorite playtime activity. Odds are if you were a child that loved to draw, paint, or build models, that still lives in you. It was your most pure desire and if you can resurface it, you’ll likely be living into a passion.
- Focus on your patterns. If you keep peppering a certain activity into your life and are always motivated to make it happen, it’s usually an indicator that it’s something you value. Gravitating toward a certain person, activity or place can be telling and point you toward an unrealized passion. Explore that.
You overcomplicate things
It may not occur to you that what you’re trying to accomplish isn’t as hard as you’re making it. Maybe you even complicate things because it gives you an “out”.
If you fear being bored or not having something to complain or worry about, you may complicate things on purpose. So even though you claim to want happiness, getting it could cut off the majority of your mind’s daily chatter, leaving you to fend for yourself and face new things.
If your ego can blur everything to appear imperfect and worrisome, it wins. It wins because it keeps you in a state of complexity rather than simplicity, and it will keep you from moving forward.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
How to overcome this: Take the plunge and be honest with yourself. If you can admit that you may be afraid to succeed or make a change, that may keep you from overcomplicating things.
Not everything needs to be a source of worry or difficulty, and life itself isn’t meant to be hard. When you start to simplify and get back to the basics of finding joy, you’ll see that is where your true happiness lies.
Consult your personal values, family, good health, good friends, enough money to live your life comfortably, and realize that things are pretty good.
Don’t complicate everything.
Successful people just learned to stay focused, remain consistent, and be diligent in their pursuit. They didn’t necessarily have an easy road, they just might have made it look easy because they had a system.
Make a plan and be persistent so you can be the creator of your own “roadmap” to success.
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