Are you harbouring the enemies to your success?

This is my follow on article to “Top 3 Tips to Setting Yourself Up for Success”. And just to briefly remind you, I explained the importance of our environment when it comes to achieving success, both our inner and outer environment. The 3 tips I shared for supporting yourself when it comes to your outer environment:

1. Clear the clutter
2. Surround yourself with uplifting people – you become like the 5 people you spend most of your time with
3. Purposefully create an environment for success – one that nurtures you

And when I speak of success, I am talking in terms of you achieving any goal and/or desire.

A quick metaphor to help illustrate the importance of our environment. If you plant a tomato seed in nutrient rich soil, water it daily, and ensure it receives the right amount of sunlight, it will flourish and bear lots of tomatoes. However, if you plant it in poor soil surrounded by weeds, don't water it and it has no sunlight, there is very little chance that it will flourish.

Makes it clear to see that without the optimum environment, our desires and goals have little chance to be realised.

So moving on to our inner environment.

There are 3 major elements that sabotage our success if allowed to and we could see them as the lack of sunlight, lack of water and the weeds in this analogy. When just one of these is present, we can feel stuck, confused, anxious, hopeless, drained, reluctant, lost, and so on. And if they are all present, our goals stand little chance of seeing the light of day!

What are these 3 elements? And how do they show up? And most importantly what can we do to eliminate them?

Fear – shows up like this.... I'm too nervous to pick up the phone and ask for business, people will think I am pushy. I'm terrified of making a fool of myself in front of an audience whether it's at an event, a networking meeting or to a sole client. It's just too difficult to sell my services. I have no business sense, people are going to rip me off. And so on .....
Doubt - shows up like this ...... What if I can't pay my bills? What if I can't deliver the service? What if I fail? What if I don't get clients? There just aren't enough clients in my area to serve. I'm not nearly as good at it as the others in my field. Why would anyone want to work with me? I need a lot more experience and more qualifications to actually run this business at all, don't I?
Indecisiveness – shows up like this ....... I don't know what to charge? I don't know whether this is good enough to put on my website. Shall I use this colour or that? Perhaps I'll wait until next week when I can ask my Mum. I'll send out my first newsletter when it's perfect .... soon. I'd like to invest in that programme, but I'm not sure whether it is worth it, I'll think about it.

The first step in eliminating these detrimental elements is awareness. Awareness that this type of thinking is going on, and then that it is not helpful to you achieve your goal. A practical tip: write out all the “lies” (fears and doubts), that are going on in your head and then destroy them – burn them, rip them up, flush down the toilet!

The 2nd step is to accept that this is all part of the process of growing into the person that can achieve this desire you have. It's like an unwelcome visitor at your door, acknowledge it, give it a hug even, thank it for coming, and quietly ask it to leave. If you resist, it will persist. The last thing you want to do is invite it in to stay. However, this happens sometimes without us knowing, and that takes us back to step 1.

The 3rd step is to focus on what you do want. Setting the inner environment for success requires you to stay focused on the truth of who you really are and not the lies of the fear and doubt

Practical tip: make a list of your own truths and post them where you can see them daily.

Remember what we focus on expands, expand into the truth of who you really are.