“All the fears that are chaining your progress as a leader are nothing more than the lies you’ve sold yourself.  Stop investing in them! Because life’s just too big to play small,” Robin Sharma.  Following up on how we spend our energy is the way in which we direct that energy as well.  I want to reiterate the following because we have to hear things seven times in seven different ways to make them stick: the brain is a powerful thing.  It can tell us tales of grandeur, tales of devastation.  It can push us forward and it can stop us in our tracks.  It’s an escape but also a cage if we let it.  Over the last few weeks we’ve been talking about leadership, learning about oneself, eliminating fear, making the choice to move forward, and doing the work.  In a nutshell this is all about managing the brain.  Where we put our thoughts and energy is what we get.  It’s what we believe, it’s what we feel.  We can change that.  We stop ourselves from achieving greatness when we seek comfort.  Right now I feel distracted like I should be doing something else, but I’m trying to force myself to work through it because I truly have no reason to not focus on my work.  It’s a subconscious fear that I won’t be successful that allows me to call it quit in the evening.  Or tries to hurriedly type out a few lines every morning.  If I truly believed I could succeed in supporting myself this way I would have my days mapped out and I wouldn’t deviate from the schedule I set for myself.  It’s fear that I won’t achieve the goal so I sabotage myself before I can even start.

I feel the life I want more than I can actually describe it.  I mean I know and am familiar with the sensation of what I’m looking to feel with my career, my home, my husband.  I’m not sure what particular action or thing will help me feel that way forever, what will make those feelings simply a state of being for me.  So I wait for someone to offer me something that would make me feel those things.  And it never tastes as real as what I’m envisioning.  It always falls short, sours early.  It’s not like I don’t work hard on a daily basis so I’m not quite sure why I don’t think I could sustain myself with my business, why I feel that work is too different.  Maybe I’m working under preconceived notions as well: that if I enjoy the work it will fall apart.  That if I enjoy the work it won’t support me. That work that’s fun is just a hobby.  And the even bigger fear is that people won’t believe in what I do.  That no one wants to hear it, that no one really believes it, that it’s too much money, that I’m a fraud somehow.  When it comes to fears and not investing in them, we have to get to the root otherwise there will be something someday that triggers it and we will be right back where we were.  I know a lot of my fear is that I don’t want to let people down if I fail—which is ironic because I’ve already failed thousands of times at different things.  My life was contingent on praise for a job well done, for getting things perfect so it’s built in me that I need to be perfect in order to try something.  I’ve seen imperfect things succeed repeatedly so I don’t know why I feel that either. 

The root comes from things that may or may not be ours.  A childhood trauma, a memory.  Simply a false belief or a sense of insecurity.  We need to at least believe in ourselves enough to try and we need to remember that leadership also refers to leading ourselves.  Not everyone sets out to lead a group of people, sometimes we just need to lead ourselves.  That in itself establishes confidence.  Walking away from what prevents us from living our fullest lives is tricky—and it’s even trickier in that we can’t walk away from ourselves when we see we are holding ourselves back.  We have to manage our energy and we need to firmly have grace and flexibility with ourselves.  We don’t grow by doing small things and every obstacle we create keeps us further from our dreams and our fullest potential.  Poor environment, poor mindset, and fear are all killers of what we know we can do, or what we know we want to do.  Just because someone once told us that we couldn’t be successful doesn’t mean that we will always be that way.  Even if we were the ones saying it—especially if we were the ones saying it.  Shifting mindset is the first step toward becoming successful.  Believing in it is the next one.  Then fearless, bold action is the next after that.  The only thing stopping us is ourselves and we can only ever be as successful as we think we can be.  Release the old thought patterns and become who we are meant to be.  Lead ourselves and lead others toward success as well—when we do well, we all do well.