I’m participating in the 10 Day Freedom Plan Blog Challenge. If you would like to join me, do so HERE! The challenge is all about action and getting clear on what your ideal lifestyle really is so that you can get focused on it and move towards it.
Today is Day 1 and the challenge of the day is “Take some time to think about your biggest challenges, then list down 2-3 of them and write a few lines about why you think they are holding you back.”
So, for me, what has been holding me back is fear of failure, lack of confidence and procrastination due to not knowing what items on my to-do list take top priority.
Fear of failure: I have no one to blame but myself if I don’t achieve my income goals. It’s scary to think about the fact that I’m the boss and only I can determine whether or not I’m successful. To get over this fear I’m trying to focus on the current tasks at hand rather than the end goal of success because success feels so vague and like it will never actually be reached. As an entrepreneur even if I hit certain income goals I feel like the work will never be done, so I’m trying to stop thinking about things as failures and rather think of them as experiments. And, rather than think about the big vague goals, I’m trying to just think of each task as the only goal I have to worry about so that as long as I’m completing each task success will be inevitable.
Lack of confidence: This one keeps me from going after the bigger clients, stops me from creating passive income type products and generally makes me afraid to put myself out there for free of people making fun of me. After chatting with a coach this week though, I’m trying to celebrate the mini-wins and learn to love rather than beat up on myself. I realized that in less than two and a half years I’ve ghost written nearly half a million words for my clients and last year I made significantly more income than I first thought and in half the amount of time my old job would have cost me. To work on my confidence I plan to celebrate the mini-wins even more and again focus more on the task at hand than the possibilities surrounding the tasks. I’m also going to work on automating and systematizing some things so they feel less emotional to me.
Procrastination: This a big one and I think it’s actually more than just not knowing what items on my to-do list take priority. If I’m being REALLY honest, I think part of the procrastination is related to the fear of failure and lack of confidence. If I simply don’t complete the items on my to-do list I can’t blame MY performance or MY skills for why I failed. I can blame the non-start and then it’s not really me that failed. To work on this, I’m trying to get my head and heart out of the game and simply act. I’m working on developing a routine so that work will become a habit I don’t even have to think about and I’m trying to create check points for my work so that it’s more like a game than something to be emotional about.
Hopefully, as I continue growing as an entrepreneur I will continue to squash these things holding me back, and let the emotions and thoughts of the journey fall to the background so that the focus will simply be on the tasks at hand. Perhaps then I will be more like a productivity machine than a person filled with fear, overthinking and too many emotions.
