When professional and personal growth is slow or stales, we tend to look for reasons outside of ourselves.
As a growth consultant and certified high-performance coach, I want to offer a different perspective. Based on my experience working with a lot of people who are frustrated by their lack of progress, the most impactful place to start is with your mindset and habits.
The most common (and hardest to quantify) reason why you aren’t progressing is an emotional block – fear, feeling of unworthiness, lack of confidence, an unproductive relationship with wealth and success, the list goes on.
Often, we use excuses like busyness and lack of know-how to validate our emotional blocks.
If you believe that growth requires a lot of effort (when you’re already stretched thin) or leads to more problems, why would you let yourself grow?
Our subconscious’ job is to protect us from danger. If growth (and change) looks like danger- guess what? You will avoid and protect against it.
Simply becoming aware of an emotional block can be very helpful. Once something is in your conscious mind, you can at least start to do something about it. A coach, or your peers and mentors can also help you work through the areas where you keep getting stuck.
There is a discrete list of things that high performers do better than most of us.
High-performers have:
Rate yourself from 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest on each area of high-performance.
Trying to improve all or many at a time is a recipe for failure. Focusing on the one area that had the lowest score can have powerful ripple effects in your confidence and progress.
Your control over outside forces is often limited. Your control over yourself, your mindset and habits is infinite. Focus on the areas you can control.
One of the best motivators is clarity. Who do you aspire to become? With clarity of your future self you can start to use her as a your personal mentor and guide.
What would your future self do? Who would she ask for help? What advice would she give you?
Focusing on your future self provides you with a clear goal to work towards.
There are no right or wrong answers. No matter what you discover, there are ways to overcome these common obstacles if you are willing to do the self-discovery and act in your best self-interest.
Shauna Mace is the founder of Inspire Growth, a growth consulting and coaching practice. She is has been helping businesses and people in financial services grow for over 16 years. Through sales consulting, high-performance coaching and growth workshops Inspire Growth helps its clients take inspired actions that produce concrete and sustainable results. Connect with Shauna on LinkedIn @shaunamace or contact her at [email protected].
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