When it comes to your goals, objections are just one of the ways mindset blocks can manifest themselves They can also appear as procrastination, a lack of focus, and never being able to find the time to work on your goals.
If you procrastinate, or lack focus, chances are high that one of two things are going on:
- You don’t know what your next action step needs to be.
- You do know what your next action step needs to be, but you aren’t doing it.
As you can imagine, these are two very different problems. Let’s start by talking about the first one.
- You don’t know what your next action step needs to be.
It’s entirely possible you don’t have the necessary training, experience, or knowledge to move forward. If that’s the case, you need to do one of two things: learn what to do next yourself, or hire someone to actually do it for you.
In a lot of cases, this is a fairly easy fix. You identify what information you need, you figure out how you’re going to acquire the information, you make a plan, and you start taking action.
Pretty simple, right? Which is why it’s also pretty likely that this isn’t the main reason you procrastinate or lack focus. If it were, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book, because you’d already have taken care of it.
So, let’s look at the second.
- You do know what your next action step needs to be, but you aren’t doing it.
This is the tricky one—you darn well know what you need to be doing, and instead of doing it, you’re watching cute cat videos online, or getting caught up in other people’s priorities, and at the end of the day, you’ve taken very little (or no) action toward living your own dreams (and worse, you’re likely not very happy about it either!).
So, what’s going on?
Well, it could be:
1) Resistance. Steven Pressfield wrote about this in “The War of Art.” Basically, any time you take steps toward your dream, or toward upleveling yourself, Resistance will rear its ugly head to try and stop you. It takes lots of different forms, but its main goal is to keep you from transforming into a better human being (which, of course, is precisely what will happen when you take steps toward your love-based goals) (Pressfield, 2014).
There’s even science to back this up. In “The Desire Map,” Danielle LaPorte quotes a top sports psychologist named Todd Herman who claims that when you significantly change your lifestyle and/or start adopting healthy habits, your cells literally change shape, which can feel really awful when you’re in the middle of it. (Although it’s actually NOT awful for your cells—there is no damage to them at all.) But, that feeling that occurs when your cells are actually changing may be at the root of what we’re calling Resistance (LaPorte, 2014).
2) A Mindset or Subconscious Block. I wrote a lot about this in my “Love-Based Money and Mindset” book, and later in this chapter, I cover a few points specific to the effects of these blocks on working toward your dreams, so keep reading.
3) An Upper Limit Problem. Gay Hendricks wrote about this in “The Big Leap”—basically, we have “subconscious ceilings” in place to keep us from feeling too good. For instance, we have a ceiling on how much money we can make, how much love we can receive, and how happy we can be (Hendricks, 2009). (This explains why a couple may end up in a huge fight after a particularly close moment, or a massive expense appears after you receive a big check.)
So, how does this come into play when working on your love-based goals? Well, if your love-based goals will make you happy, and you have a limit to how happy you’re allowing yourself to feel, you may find yourself unable to take steps toward those goals.
All three of these possibilities have one thing in common—in a nutshell, some part of you may not be on board with your living your dreams, fulfilling your purpose, and/or becoming the person you’re meant to be. And, if that’s true, I can tell you right now that it doesn’t matter how many productivity or goal books you read; you simply are not going to take regular, consistent action toward making your goals your reality.
Maybe as a child you were constantly belittled for wanting to be an artist, and were told to “grow up and get a real job.” Or maybe you somehow got the idea you weren’t smart enough, or good enough, to live your dreams. Or maybe you were always the “responsible” one, and “responsible” people have “responsible, boring” jobs. Or maybe you have a secret fear your family will leave you, or you’ll lose love if you start living your dream life.
These are just a few of the million reasons why part of you may be standing in the way of your dreams. To dive deeper into this topic I invite you to order my new book, Love-Based Goals: Your Guide to Living Your Purpose and Passion.
