What’s in your way?
Do you ask yourself this question often enough? Sometimes that answer can be annoyingly obvious and puts the ball right back in our court. But asking tough questions is part of the process as you Reclaim Your Life.
Annoying!
Yet powerful.
I’ve been asking myself this question a lot more lately and put pen to paper now as an exercise. It helps every time and I thought I’d share this tonight.
First of all, if you’re feeling really frustrated about your progress with a particular goal and you spend most of your energy telling yourself why it’s easier for someone else, you might start with my post recently about “Whose Garden Are You Tending?”.
Next, get a piece of paper and write out each perceived barrier or obstacle to a goal you’re working on currently yet feel frustrated with somehow. No judging or editing of the barrier – just get it out of your head and onto paper so it can be dealt with.
Leave space for a couple of lines and continue with the next barrier
Continue this until you get to about 10 or run out of the barriers or obstacles currently in your mind about a particular goal.
Now, go back to the first one, slash a line through it and write below how you will plan to ignore, sidestep, blast away differently or minimize it. Take the control back and focus on what you CAN do rather than what you CANNOT do. Don’t stay stuck.
Once you’ve done that with your initial list, you should already start to feel better. We humans are crazy creatures and our brains can get stuck replaying the same, stuck part of a negative track unless we take some sort of action to do something.
This exercise helps you do that.
You also now have some action steps to take for the goal that had previously been frustrating you. That feels good, too.
As you move ahead, you’ll be able to look back at some previous barriers and realize the angle of your approach made it more difficult than it had to be.
You might decide to claim an extra victory by going back to knock it out of the way easily from the other side to pay it forward for the next person that comes along.
And maybe someone two steps ahead of you looks back to see you do that and does the same for YOU! Before you even get stuck at the next possible obstacle.
All of this can start when you stop being stuck and ask yourself honestly as you start to reclaim your life …
What’s really in your way?
by Sean O’Meara 