Personal Development: Maximizing Your Potential

It's chicken and egg. Which came first, the guilt or the anger? Not clear? What is clear is that when you oscillate between these two states, you massively lose energy. And you also get majorly bummed. 

It goes like this. Let's say you notice you're feeling guilty. You're attacking yourself for some error. But then you start to feel that your feeling guilty is completely unjustified. And you get angry.

But when you step back, you notice that you actually started feeling guilty in the first place for having gotten angry.

Self-attack followed— you saw yourself in the wrong—and then came indignation that you should be the one feeling guilty! After all, wasn't it this person or that person who made you angry in the first place! 

It's not a way to live and you know it. But in the middle of it you feel stuck and at the same time out of control.

There is a way out of this energy-depleting process but the solution is so different from conventional advice it’s going to make you laugh!

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If you aren't reaching your goals and it feels like when you get close, you back from your dreams, fear of success may be getting in your way. Fear of success tempts us to procrastinate, fall behind and make excuses. If so, or if you've ever felt that success is scary, you need to understand what else is going on below the surface. Once you do, you can master fear of success and achieve your goals and dreams bt following five steps.

Fear of demands

First of all, if you fear success, it's highly likely that what you fear about success is not actually success itself. It's more likely that below the surface you fear that if you reach a goal or dream you might not live up to what people will expect of you.

What you think might expect of you if you become successful can stop you dead in your tracks, at least for a while. This is especially true if you've coasted or only recently stepped out to make a move to fulfill a goal or dream.

The other thing that's probably true if you fear success is that you've probably been hanging back and coasting. If you've been coasting it's likely that you have a hard time of conceiving of yourself as suddenly successful. In some way the concept you have of yourself doesn't quite fit how you imagine a successful person to be.

That's partly reasonable. If you haven't fulfilled your vision of what it means to be successful, it makes sense that your self-image doesn't fit your picture of what being a success is. And if you don't fit the picture you won't let the picture happen.

As a consequence you may sabotage success by procrastinating, falling behind, making excuses or otherwise appearing flaky or unreliable. Or you might come to the brink of success and simply stop there, vacillating—like someone who completes law school but doesn't take the bar exam; or like someone who finishes requirements but doesn't file the paperwork for a teaching credential.

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Fear of making a mistake prompts us to avoid going all the way to our dream for fear that what we held as our dream might turn out to disappoint us.

If you have nibbled around the edges of a dream but stopped short of going all out to pursue it, check out what one of my mentoring clients said to me recently:

"What if  I finally go ahead and take the plunge, and it turns out not to be as big a deal as I thought it would be? What if what I've been putting off all this time disappoints me, and it all turns out to be a big mistake?"

If that concern sounds familiar, you probably experience complicated feelings that can be major obstacles to success. Fears that you might be wrong about how much your dream really means to you, often engender a distracting internal back and forth.

And if you have skirted the confrontation with what is real, especially by taking paths other than your real calling, you may have other fears. These include that after all this time you could be hugely disappointed to discover that what you held dear turns out to be not all that.

So how do you do end this fear and move beyond it? For starters, it helps to understand how this fear may have developed in the first place.

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Fear of failure leads directly to underachievement. Why? It paralyzes initiative and leads us to duck out on challenges, pull back effort and quit. The result is that we wind up doing less with our abilities than we know we could. And self-attack and energy-sapping mood swings follow.

Here's what to do to end fear of failure.

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Let's say you have a goal to advance your career and increase your income. Sounds straightforward. But to reach that goal you could take any of a variety of different actions—some more imaginative, some more risky, some more conservative.  

The key to reaching any goal is that you have to make smart decisions about the actions you take to fulfill it.  If not, you could actually set yourself back. On the other hand, if you make  smart decisions, you reach your goal more quickly. 

To make intelligent decisions you need a set of reliable steps to follow—a template for making decisions.

Here’s one that works, and here's why.

Large changes—big upheavals—draw your attention and in so doing, either provoke learning or put you on overload and immobilize you. But the secret to moving beyond merely the next level always lies in milking decision-making in ordinary situations for all the information possible.  In other words, the wisdom you need to go far arises from paying close attention to the obvious and the everyday—to what is right in front of you. If you master the following four principles and look and listen in a particular way, you will.

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•A highly placed but dissatisfied IT professional from a major software company is considering leaving because he does not like the approach of the person recently hired to manage the programmers, a Harvard MBA.

I ask whether he feels he could do a better job.  In response he tells me three times: “I am a programmer; I am not a people person.”

•I am on the phone with the recruiter for a consulting company.  She says her company has 60 to 70 consultants.  She mentions problems staffing the San Francisco office.  Four years pass, we speak again.

This time she tells me, “We have between 60 and 70 consultants and we will probably always have between 60 and 70 consultants.”  Oh, and PS:  The company “still can’t staff the San Francisco office.”

The problem?  In each case, Lethal Language.  Each speaker described their situations in words that express that killed off possibilities.

Memo to you:  As sure as words describe, they likewise specify limits.  “I am not a people person,” and “We have between 60 and 70 consultants and we will probably always have between 60 and 70 consultants,” are descriptions that limit possibilities and ward off even trying.

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Here are the top ten signs of subtle self-limiting. If you spot a few, you have roadblocks to clear in order to live the life you want.

10) You feel overwhelmed and behind.

Being overwhelmed is neither a sign of ambition nor a matter of having bitten off more than you can chew. When you feel overwhelmed, it is never a matter of what or how much you have to do; rather, it is a matter of having delayed doing it. ALWAYS. In fact, the biggest reason you feel overwhelmed is either momentary or habitual procrastination, and this is always your single biggest waste of time.

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To change, even when the change is one we want, immediately creates adversity.

Why?

One of our strongest needs is to feel like we know what we're doing. Beyond that we want life to make sense, and we'd like our experiences to fit in with what we already know. Not many of us like difficulty, or feeling inept.

 When you start changing habits—even limiting ones—you shake things up.  That's why change temporarily leads to problems. This creates a problem for people who want to change and are unaware that feeling awkward is a sign you are changing.  Just as runners used to collapse as they neared the finish line when attempting to run the “impossible” four-minute-mile, you, too, are influenced by history and by what you are used to and expect.  

To experience breakthroughs, you can't quit. You have to be mentally tough enough to power through these uncomfortable but expectable occurrences. I am going to tell you exactly how to do it in just two steps.

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A lot of what is written about motivation makes it sound like you always have to be pumping yourself up in some artificial way in order to want to accomplish something.  If that is true for you, you may be pursuing the wrong goals or at least the wrong activities.

Let’s start with the obvious.  You don’t have to motivate kids to go out and play.  If you do, there’s a problem.   Motivation is a naturally occurring phenomenon under the right circumstances.  That’s the motivation you need.  Anything else suggests that something basic and vital is missing.

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You’ve seen this, right?  The sign outside the new restaurant says “Opening, Spring 2010.” And by the time the restaurant opens, it’s fall.  Or you hire a contractor and no matter the project, the completion date slides.

If you’ve ever had trouble keeping a project on schedule you are obviously not alone.  The typical outcome for large-scale projects is for them to come in late and over budget.  You can name plenty in your own organization, municipality or State.  And maybe a few of your own.  I know I can! 

But help is on the way.

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