Are You Holding Yourself Back?
While I was talking to a friend today the discussion revolved around how we used to collaborate a while back. We haven’t talked about it since we ended our collaboration on really bad terms. Now we seem to have put our differences aside, and have mostly been able to accept our fair share of wrong doings and begun to talk about each of our perspectives, and explain to each other how we experienced the ordeal. I don’t know where to begin in explaining how this feedback was beneficial for both of us, but I can see something is happening in our working relationship, and this is what I want to talk about.
I have read books and articles about how we tend to condition ourselves to follow the course in life that has been inculcated by society and family. And what we concluded from the conversation mentioned above, was that our deep-seated attitudes and beliefs govern how we relate to others.
Even when you have a burning desire to change your situation, be it financial, health related or with regard to how you perceive other people there is this inner force that works against you.
It goes something like this: ”This is my last burger, I will eat healthy starting tomorrow,” or, “This is the last day without exercise, I will start exercising tomorrow.” Yet that tomorrow never comes for some reason. We tend to find excuses for why we overruled what we said we’ll do. They usually go like this: ”I haven’t had much to eat today, so I can eat a burger and it will be fine,” or, “I walked to do groceries, so I can consider it as working out.” Sound familiar?
This can apply to almost all of the activities that we say we’ll do, yet we never get to do them. It’s not the lack of time, we do have some spare time in which we were totally capable of doing what we said we would do, yet we make excuses to ourselves by saying that we haven’t had a break in a long time and we end up doing nothing.
Many experts talk about changing mindsets and overcoming our subconscious barriers, but why should this be necessary? Is it because we lack the mental discipline needed to get into a constructive routine? Or is it because of our conditioning from the past? Why are we afraid of progress?
I am calling it ‘fear’ as I don’t have a better word for it. But when you analyse it, you can realise how you hold yourself back from the progress that you want to attain. It’s like your mind doesn’t want you to get to where you aspire to be. The excuse is an easier choice compared to the effort required to get the work done and this is the primary reason we fail to act. But even after we have started acting and we get some momentum going, all it takes is one small failure to send us back to where we were for a long period of time, or at least that’s how we feel.
In reality, we are further ahead than we were when we started. All we need to do is keeping taking those steps forward, not allowing ourselves to slack off, and continually challenging that inertia that keeps us ‘comfortable’. Are we too lazy to break out of our comfort zones or is it our previous learnings, fears and conditioning that are holding us back?
