Practical tool: How to get rid of what's holding you back

When you think about your failures, you may see them as the result of your lack of knowledge, lack of action, or as the result of being surrounded by the wrong people. Sometimes, you may even see what’s holding you back as the result of bad luck.

But all these things aren’t actually holding us back.

If you lack knowledge, just study more, get knowledgeable and try again. If you lack action, create yourself a plan, make it specific, and try again. If you’re surrounded by the wrong people, define the type of people you want around you, search for them, and try again.

The thing is, when you have to try again after you’ve failed, that’s when the things that are holding you back appear.

Most of the time, those are things like:

• The feeling of control and the control you feel you need to have;
• The obstacles you set yourself.

Let’s imagine you want to make a living out of your passion and transform your passion into a business. You have no clue how to do it so you set yourself to buy a few books and enroll in some courses. You invest over $250 into educating yourself on the topic and, after two months of studying, you decide you want to put into practice, even though you haven’t finished learning the initial material you set yourself to learn.

You create social media profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, a website to promote your products or services, and you start speaking about your new business. But soon enough you see there are no sales and people don’t seem too interested in what you’re doing. That could be one thing that is holding you back from advancing.

It’s been four months since you decided to transform your passion into a business and you start feeling sad, maybe even frustrated or depressed.

That’s when the feeling of control appears. You’ll want to feel anything but sad, frustrated, or depressed and you’ll control the presence or absence of those feelings by focusing on anything else. You’ll stop working on your business simply because you haven’t yet found the success you’re looking for.

Somehow, this has to do with the expectations you set yourself. But what’s holding you back is more than that.

You see, expectations are not a bad thing. Even though you set yourself expectations that you may never be able to reach, that’s not a bad thing. Instead, what you should take care of is the way you behave when your expectations aren’t met.

The importance of optimism for getting rid of what’s holding you back

Being an optimist is strongly related to having the ability to know that whatever you set yourself to do, you will be able to achieve it. I’m not talking about goals, I’m talking about a vision.

When you set yourself to make a business out of your passion, I’m talking about a vision. When you decide on the passion you want to transform into a business, I’m talking about a goal.

You see, in order to make a business out of your passion, there are a few things that you have to do right:

• Pick the right passion;
• Make sure that passion can help others – it should be solving a need;
• Understand how to make business – marketing, sales, team management, project management, and more;
• Understand people and why people decide to buy something.

The list can go on and you won’t be able to get everything right from the start. For sure, you don’t have to get everything right from the start to see that your business is successful, but you need to get a few of them.

In case that’s not happening, you should have the ability to know that eventually you’ll have a passion transformed into a business, you just have to adjust a few things for that to happen.

As I’ve said, it’s important how you behave when your expectations aren’t met. Knowing that you’ll eventually get where you want to be, will impact the way you behave when your expectations aren’t met and will help you get rid of what’s holding you back.

This tool will help you

1. Understand the control behind who you are and decide who you should be.
2. Discover the green and red dots behind failure.
3. Understand why the obstacles you set yourself aren’t in your control.
4. Learn how to avoid creating obstacles.