Breaking Down Barriers
- Oct 5, 2021
- 4 min read
Written by: Whitnie Wiley, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
What gets in the way of you accomplishing your goals? If you are like most, what gets in the way is not external to you.
As we attempt to achieve our goals, the thing that gets in the way for most of us is ourselves—our mind, really, or the things we think. We start to imagine all the reasons why something won’t work or wonder whether we are good enough or worthy of the accomplishment. Once we throw up those barriers, it becomes difficult to do what we had set out to do.
There are scientific reasons why we do this. Instead of just having a goal, making a plan, and taking action as a way to protect ourselves, our monkey brain starts to ponder all manner of things that are not particularly relevant to the task at hand. Then once the mind begins on this independent journey, it can be tough to get it to slow down to get a positive thought in edgewise.
The best course of action is to keep our minds filled with positive and affirming thoughts out the gate, though not in some positive thinking, rah-rah, new age-y way.
Put simply, when positivity fills our minds, there is nowhere for negativity to gain a foothold. But, there is hope. If a crack appears and negative thoughts wander in, we can attack the barriers to success those thoughts build.
One of the best approaches is to turn our thoughts from ourselves to others. Whether the others are family, friends, or strangers, or they are involved in the endeavor that we have started to have doubts about, it doesn’t matter. When we focus on serving others instead of ourselves, we tend to relax and improve our well-being.
Try this. Picture someone you love and put a smile on your face. While you’re smiling and thinking these thoughts, focus on the project. Shift your thoughts back and forth between the project and the benefit completing the project will have for this person.
If you start to get anxious or nervous about whether you can complete the project, simply go back to thinking about the person you love and the benefits to them. Your goal here is to fill your mind with thoughts of love and happiness for someone else when the project is complete, not how you’ll get it done or even if you can.
You’ll notice that as long as you are focused on someone else, smiling, and feeling what you will feel when you can give this person the gift of the project’s completion, there is no room for you to thinking negatively about your performance. It may not be possible in the beginning to hold on to that thought, but know that with practice and over time, you will.
This is your why. Our whys are not usually to make money or buy new things but to feel the underlying emotions we want to enjoy. We aim to make the people we love happy. And we want to live lives of significance.
The big and small dreams we dream of are about getting to those emotions. When we focus on the emotional aspects instead of just the outcome itself, we can break through those intellectual barriers that negative thoughts can introduce while accomplishing our goals.
Our brains are designed for survival purposes to seek the negative. However, with focus and intention, we can retrain our brains to better serve us by turning our attention back to our why when it starts to move in a direction that is not serving us.
Once our focus is in the right direction, it is time to take action. Our thoughts provide a foundation or a platform from which we can perform, but it is only in taking action that we will develop the confidence to complete the task. The more we move forward despite the negative thoughts that come up, the more confidence we’ll have to take action in the future.
We may never get to a place where negative thoughts never pop up, but we can learn to navigate around them and achieve our goals anyway with the right tools. It is not the absence of fear, obstacles, or self-created barriers that matter, but the fact that we take action despite them—breaking down the barriers in the process.
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Whitnie Wiley, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Whitnie Wiley is a leader in organizational, leadership, and employee development. After spending years in companies with crummy cultures and lousy leadership, Whitnie has dedicated herself to helping organizations and individuals adopt and implement strategies that create workplaces people love to work in. As an in-demand coach, speaker, and trainer, Whitnie shares wisdom from her own life experiences, as well as those of her clients, with grace, humility, and humor to drive change in today's business world. Her clients include aspiring, emerging and new executives aiming to be the kinds of leaders even they'd want to work for and organizations seeking to hire, develop and promote the best talent. Whitnie is a seven-time bestselling author and is anticipating the publication of four books in 2021, including her first solo effort, "The SIMPLE Leader(TM)." As the host of "Love Your Work," she interviews guests about the work they love to do, their journey, and lessons learned along the way. She also co-hosts the "Life, Lemons & LemonDrops" and the "Beyond Your Best Plan" podcasts.
