As we build our success, our personal brand, and our business, we may hunt around for amazing materials to rise up with. We look to mentors and icons to see what they do. But it’s just as important to look at what they do not do. Just like any working building site, we need to have shoots to slide the garbage down. Some of the gear we have on site, just isn’t helping, it’s getting in the way so let’s do a bit of a lifestyle stock take, and get rid of some things that are well past their use by date.
This is one of the things I always ask at the beginning of my trainings; ‘In order to reach this success, what do I need to give up about myself?’
It’s so important to know this, because if we didn’t have these things holding us back we’d probably be successful already. So becoming clear on the costs, on what we have that’s not working, is so essential for aligning our conscious and unconscious desires to get to that end result.
All you need to do here is take the time to really consider the rubbish. Personally, I’d love for you to grab a pen for this one and write down the ways in which you currently do these following things, and list all the ways this could be holding you back from success – whatever success might be for you.
Then it’s up to you to decide if you want to consider changing this activity to something more positive, something more rewarding.
I’m not going to tell you to change, that’s up to you. It could be that by reading this list one thing really jumps out at you as your sabotage pattern, and when you address that, everything flows much more smoothly.
Get creative, get Troublesome. Get those garbage shoots out and see what needs to go down, in order for you to rise up.
The biggest things sabotaging your success are:
1. Your Ego
Get your mindset right before you do anything else. Getting your mind from victim or aggressor to what I call ‘The Now Position’ will make every other task on this list doable.
The victim or aggressor positions are only about survival, they’re not about thriving. This is the place of laying blame, making excuses, attaching labels and justifying your position.
That’s not to say that victims and aggressors can’t be successful, they can, if they feel they are born with natural talents or have the recipe for success.
In a shifting market, that kind of success is not only short-lived, it’s also pretty stressful, because there is that constant feeling your status is under threat.
The other option is to be the creator. To have the ability to respond to any given situation by rising to the challenge and being in the ‘now’. This is that path of being a troublemaker that the ego simply can’t venture along.
To be a troublemaker you need to be willing to take risks, make mistakes and disrupt the pattern. Your ego will prevent you from doing all these things and, even if you are successful, without being creative there is a very set limit to how far you can go.
You will never be able to be your best unless you take responsibility for every action and respond to your environment.
How do you know if you are in creative mode and willing to take your success to the ultimate level? Easy. Victims and aggressors rely on labels. They label everything around them as good, not good, hard, not hard and work tirelessly to preserve these labels.
Leaving the Ego behind leaves all the labels behind; where you come from, your gender, your financial status, what people say about you or said about you instantly vanishes and everything you see, hear and experience becomes an opportunity.
When you seize everything as an opportunity to grow you will love failing, love learning, and growth and success will be secondary bonuses to living a full and creative life.
2. Being Perfect
If things are perfect, then you’ve stopped growing. You’ve stopped learning and you are in a cycle of doing the same things over and over. That’s not a great sounding place.
Think about what you are actually saying when you say, “I want it to be perfect.”
You want it to be rigid, unmovable, strict and boring….really?
Living a life of perfection means you are not in the now, you are either stuck in the past or stuck in the future!
It’s the fear of failure (or possibly even the fear of great success) that can trigger this idea of perfection as an excuse to keep us from moving forward.
In this space, we try to control everything and everyone around us, leading to huge amounts of stress. We attempt to relive the same situation over and over in order to control it and combat that fear.
It’s important to note that a leader isn’t someone who controls their environment. A leader isn’t the person who makes the right choices for themselves and everyone around them. A leader is someone who inspires people to do their very best, even if the situation they are in seems impossible.
What does that mean?
Go out and give it a go, be dazzling, be courageous, and learn from every one of those moments that are not perfect.
3. Your Comfy Lifestyle
We are not here to party.
Being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean you get all night pool parties, big houses and bling jewellery, that’s the life of a rap star. If you want that life, learn to lay out a beat and look tough in a baseball hat.
Entrepreneurs strive to be at the top of everything they do for the good of others.
They create a pathway that means other people have a more rewarding life.
That means work. Lots of it. Discovering your own path and showing others how to use it.
In order to maintain that you need to give up the comforts that are damaging.
Excessive TV and web browsing. Cut it down or turn it off. Binge watching Game of Thrones is not going to get you anywhere!
Eat well. That means a high alkaline diet of fresh veg, natural protein, fruit and omega 3.
Sleep well, have a set bedtime, and stick to it.
Exercise. Take pride in your health and your body and love yourself, it’s the only successful way to love everyone and change the world. That doesn’t necessarily mean six hours of gym a day but some movement every day is essential to moving energy and getting the most out of your creative mind. I love to start my morning with a walk along Manly beach, focussing on the goals I will achieve that day.
4. The Prison of the Good Opinion of Others
Being locked into pleasing other people gets you off your agenda and onto everyone else’s faster than a Formula 1 car at Albert Park. The worst part is, if you’re not 100% committed to your goal, it can happen without you even noticing!
There is no way possible you can get to your goal and be successful if you are worried about what people are saying or thinking about you. This includes family, friends, and anyone you are close to!
The truth is this, no matter what you do or how you do it, someone out there won’t like it. If you want to take that personally, be my guest, but that’s a pretty limited way of looking at things.
It might have nothing to do with you, it might remind them of something that happened to them in the past, you may just be triggering something about themselves they don’t like.
If you’d like to be successful, this is one you really need to be okay with letting go of.
It’s absolutely okay for people not to like you. It’s okay to challenge how other people think and ignite an emotion in them because THAT alone might get them moving, that alone might even save a person’s life.
So, you can stay in the prison of the good opinion of others, or you can break out and do your own thing, focus on your own goals and get to a place you really love, knowing that you create a path for others to follow if they wish.
5. Playing Small
This is one I touch on and something I see all the time at Live It Now. People terrified to stand up and be great because it might make other people feel bad.
Tall poppy syndrome means that the social norm is for everyone to perform at an average level. We tend to see this and adopt this quite young.
Well, my question is an easy one. Do you want to be average? Are you comfortable limiting your creativity, your talents and your success to a level that is ‘socially acceptable.’
If you focus on the average population, it seems like there are a lot of them, however, if you focus on the great people out there, the successful people, you will see there are so many poppies already taller than you!
Not only that but they are admired and respected. So is the small poppy syndrome real, or are you just using that as an excuse not to go out there and live the life of your dreams?
My advice, only ever look up. Look up and head skyward and really soak up that sun you have been craving.
Being successful doesn’t mean you are not humble, it doesn’t mean you stop growing or stop learning. It just means you stretch yourself every day and love what you’re doing.
Your true potential is your birthright and stifling that will always feel inauthentic. Ask yourself what you want from your life when you are 90 years old and looking back. Go and live that life. No regrets, because if you are playing small the thought of growing older and looking back probably doesn’t feel great. Let go of all those doubts and give yourself permission to shine bright and grow tall.
The best part about it is, other poppies just like you will gain permission to grow as well. Let’s bring the standard up from average to excellent. Let’s make this success and happiness the norm.
6. Give Up Multi-Tasking
Doing two cognitive tasks at one time is actually impossible. Brain wave studies on this have shown that what we actually do is switch rapidly from one task to another. They call it switch tasking and it makes you really stupid. Researchers even compare the level of mental ability when you are ‘multi-tasking’ to be similar or worse than being stoned on marijuana!
I know, you might be thinking, well I watch TV and eat dinner at the same time.
Do you? Do you enjoy that dinner, do you chew it, do you taste it, are you aware of that satisfying feeling of being full?
When you do one thing at a time you do it well.
Set up a list of what you want to achieve in your day and make your way down it one by one. You will not only have more energy for each task but your focus will mean a better result and more aware of what you have created, allowing bigger opportunities to then stem from and branch off what you’ve already started.
At the same time, give up on dual goals. Focusing on what you want as well as what you don’t want will mean no focus and no smarts. Switch all your focus to what you do want. Use that one to get you moving and stay motivated.
Recapping that one again in case you were doing something else just then. Two things at once causes severe distraction. Just do one and do it well.
If you’re ready to give up the things that are sabotaging your success and develop a mindset that will make you a highly successful entrepreneur, register now for our free event, The Disruption Tour, and get ready to create a disruption to create an eruption of opportunities.
Stay troublesome,
Matt Catling
