It won't always be easy

Forget about what other people think. Forget the doubts. Forget the fear.  Don't listen to the naysayers. Don't let anyone stop you. Don't worry so much. Don't hold back.

Live your life. Follow your heart. Do things you think are impossible. Dream big. Be yourself and believe in that person. Do what makes you feel alive. 

This takes work and dedication and courage and strength. It's not always going to be easy, but the best things in life rarely are and it will be worth it. What do you want to do?

The Voice

So stop listening to it. You are never going to be able to completely silence the voice. When you think you may have, it will pop up at the worst time and start spreading doubt. You can ignore it...in fact, you must get good at ignoring it. This voice, the one only you can hear, will hold you back from reaching your potential more than anything else.

This voice pops up all the time, whether you are exercising or training or applying for a new job or learning a new language or studying a subject you find interesting or taking classes or doing anything new and different. It holds us back and convinces us to not give our all. I don't know if this is a survival mechanism from when we were hunter/gatherers or something new, but we have to learn that it has no place in our life.

The good thing is you can start to quiet it when you prove it wrong. It doesn't matter how you prove it wrong; all you have to do is keep going when it says you can't do something. Don't let it stop you or zap your motivation. Keep pushing and keep going. You will break through. You are capable of doing anything, if you put in the work, no matter what this shitty, little voice says.

The key is to recognize this voice for what it is when it pops up. You can even give the voice a name, if you want. Tell it to shut up, argue with it or just ignore it, but don't believe it. This voice will come up with great reasons why you shouldn't do things...it's too cold or wet to run, it's too late to study, you're not smart enough to learn that, this TV show looks better than hitting the gym, you don't have the qualifications for that job, you can't afford to go back to school, etc. These excuses are all bullshit.

Nothing you really want to do is going to be easy. If it was, you would have already done it. But, if you really want to do something, then it matters to you. Don't let bullshit excuses from a voice in your head stop you from doing them. Get out there and do the work. Don't let the rain stop you from running. Don't let fear of failure stop you from learning something new or applying for the job or moving across the country. Don't let any of the excuses stop you from doing the work you need to do. Don't let the voice convince you that doing something hard is a waste of time. It's not. Letting the voice win is the waste. Don't spend another day letting it control your life.

What is Possible?

The human mind is crazy. For many of us, we are full of doubts. We constantly think we can't do something and then put less effort in to it because of this mindset. We have a hard time believing we can accomplish amazing things, even when we see others doing it. They must be different or just better or genetically superior. When we don't believe, we can't do everything possible to succeed. The problem is we will never really know what we are capable of doing until we do it.

To achieve amazing things, we have to push ourselves in ways we never though possible. Our minds must remain open to possibility and we have to allow, yes allow, ourselves to push harder than before. We have to believe we can do anything we want to accomplish, no matter what anyone else says or does. There can be no doubts or fears, only belief and drive.

Many people thought it impossible a human could run a 4 minute mile. Roger Bannister didn't listen to them and in 1954 did the impossible. This has now been done by many more people. What was once impossible is possible. Many people never thought a human would stand on the summit of Mount. Everest. This was before  Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit in 1953. This has also been accomplished by many people since. What was once impossible is possible. We've put people in space and on the moon; we've created machines allowing people to stay under water for months; we can speak with anyone in the world instantaneously; we can fly; we can bring people back to life after death. All of this was accomplished because someone believed it could be done.

Creating amazing things isn't easy. Not everyone will do it. Most of us will never push ourselves beyond what we we think we can do. We won't really know what our limits are because we will never test them. Without pushing these limits, we won't do the impossible. What do you want to do? Besides your limiting doubts and lack of belief, what's stopping you? Stop doubting and start believing. Start doing. Your goal may not change the world, but getting there will change your world. What are you actually capable of doing?

Get Out Of Your Head

Dream. Do the work. Challenge yourself. Take chances. Feel free to fail. Be yourself. Blaze your own path. Learn something new every day. Create great art. Do something amazing. These are all things I have written about doing and think we should all strive to do. The hard part, the part many of us continue to struggle with, is getting out of our own heads and actually doing them.

Even though we may not realize it, we spend a lot of our time comparing ourselves to others and doing what we think the world wants us to do. We become frustrated when we can't express what we want to express; when we can't enjoy doing things we think other people want us to do; when we just can't quite live up to the ideas we have planted in our heads of what we are supposed to be like. We worry about the things we feel we should be doing. We regret the things we did or didn't do. We start to have doubts when we see someone who is writing better than us or creating better art or taking more chances or doing anything we want better than us.

Instead of getting out there and doing what we should, we become paralyzed by over-analyzing. We allow our fears and doubts and frustrations to paralyze us and continue to have more fears or more doubts or more frustration. We aren't able to accomplish the things we want to accomplish because we are constantly worried about getting it wrong or not being able to do it. We become frustrated when we feel we aren't doing what adults should be doing or when we can't just keep on track or no one is reading our writing or no one is buying our art. We get scared because we don't know what we should be doing and instead of looking and trying new things, we stick with what we have, even though we know it isn't the path we are looking for. We freeze and allow more negativity to creep in.

To do anything that matters to you, you have to stop allowing the negativity to creep in. If you want people to read what you are writing, keep writing. If you want people to buy your art, keep creating and putting it into the world. If you want to blaze your own path, then keep dreaming and taking action.  If you want to find what you love to do, you have to search for it. Ignore the frustrations and doubts and fears and just push forward. Stop assuming you know what other people think about who you are and what you do. Stop worrying. Stop the self-flagellation. It's good to critically think about what you do or who you are, but being overly critical or self-deprecating is just wrong. Stop letting this happen.

I know, you are saying this is easier said than done and you are right. Start by becoming more aware of what you are thinking and how you are feeling. Question yourself when you start to feel the frustration and doubts and fears. Don't berate yourself for feeling them, but question where they come from. Notice these feelings and allow your awareness to help dissipate them. Every time they pop up, continue to do this. Once we start eliminating this negativity, what can we accomplish? When we don't freeze from the negativity, there is nothing stopping us. It's about time we got out of our own heads and actually did something.  

What Do You Really Want To Do?

Look around at all the people you know. My guess is most of them aren't doing what they really want to do. Do you know why? Doing what you really want to do is hard.

No one said life was going to be easy, but many of us never realized how hard it would actually be to do the things we want to do. There are bills to pay and obligations to meet and jumping off the bandwagon is scary. We dig our ruts in work and outside of it and we are afraid to get out of them. We convince ourselves we are comfortable in the life we have dug and we learn to silence the voice saying there is something more, something better out there, if we would only try.

Forging our own path is hard. It's scary. There is the chance for failure around every corner. We may offend people. People may think we are crazy. People may talk about us. We will have to take responsibility for ourselves. Our mind screams "I don't have what it takes" and we constantly wonder what will happen if things don't work out. We imagine the worst case scenario (while not ever imagining the best case scenario). Filled with fear and doubt, we convince ourselves it is impossible. We quit before we even start.

How do you get past all of this and do what you really want to do? First, stop paying any attention to all the crap in the last paragraph. Figure out what you want to do and start doing it. This doesn't mean you have to completely change your life, but work on what you want to do. Picture the best case scenario and then start. Keep doing whatever it is. You don't need to have a full plan in place, you just have to start. Your plan would change overtime, anyway. Start taking steps and see what happens.

What is it that you really want to do? Forget about all the doubts, all the fears, all the worries and just start doing it.

Confidence

For many people, confidence can be very difficult to come by. This is not feeling we are superior, but feeling we are doing the right thing or a good job. Many people will wonder if they are doing good enough work or leading people in the right direction and worry they are not doing either well. Even if we have faith in our abilities, it can be hard to truly believe we are doing good work.

I often see lack of confidence in the way I take things people say as being negative when it is not meant as such. When our confidence wains, we will often assume innocuous comments are meant as an attack on our abilities or actions. When we think we are not doing a good job (even when we are), we will see others critiques or passing comments as more than they are meant to be. Having confidence, truly believing in ourselves, can be difficult for most of us as it requires faith, even when things aren't going as well as we hope.

Every day, we are confronted with problems and difficulties and failures. All of these have the ability to derail our confidence and cause us to wonder if we are moving in the right direction. Once we start to lose our confidence, we start to imagine this lack of confidence from others, too. Most of us work in an environment where we don't have someone helping to boost our confidence when we start to lose it. When the confidence levels drop, it is also hard to believe the people who are trying to help us bring it back to the level it should be. We are our own worst critics and have a hard time believing others think we are doing a good job when we don't see it.

We have to push through the dips in confidence, fix what needs to be fixed and keep pushing towards our goals. No one goes through life without doubting their work or their abilities, but the great ones keep pushing and trying to do better when they start to lose confidence. We have to be able to give ourselves credit and trust we have it in us to do great work. We have to be honest and see when we are not doing our best work and challenge ourselves to do better. At the same time, we have to see when we are doing everything we can and have confidence in it. This isn't always easy to do, but the more we work on it, the better we will get. We have to keep pushing and doing the best we can. We have to believe in ourselves if we ever hope to see how much others believe in us.