The Way Up: What Stops You?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

One way or another, we are all trying to achieve something, it's just that everyone's spheres are different and the criteria for success are also different. Someone is building a business, and someone is dreaming of finally getting an education, but cannot complete what they have begun in any way. Someone is trying to earn more, and someone is trying to do more at home. Someone wants universal admiration, and someone wants a positive assessment from significant people. Day after day we solve current problems, overcome obstacles, build our own world in which we will be comfortable.

What prevents people from achieving what they want? Each time my client and I are looking for a personal answer to this question, appropriate to each specific case. But some patterns are striking in one way or another. Therefore, I decided to try to highlight some of the most common obstacles to success, the most common obstacles that prevent people from achieving their goals.

Successful or comfortable

It's not good to be angry. Raising your voice is impolite. To demand something for yourself is “selfishness”. You cannot express dissatisfaction with the current situation, be capricious, refuse what was offered, ask for more, “be greedy”, or protest. Many of us were taught the same thing as children - to be comfortable. Convenient for parents, teachers, teams. Of course, we all live in a civilized world, and we need to follow the rules, so not all ways of expressing our experiences are acceptable. But from childhood, many of us have entrenched a demand not for the forms of expression of emotions, but for the emotions themselves - you can't get angry, you can't want to, you can't get upset.

Emotions are a natural physiological reaction of the body, they are there, this is neither good nor bad. The forms of their expression can be socially approved or not, but for some reason the disapproval caused by certain forms of manifestation of feelings very often spreads to the feelings themselves. Yes, probably, the parents were right when they reacted negatively to the fact that the child falls on the floor in the store and kicks the shop window, not getting what he wanted. But this does not mean that the child should be prohibited from wanting more, you just need to choose other forms of manifestation of this desire. Yes, perhaps, to beat with a spatula someone else's kid who took away the child's favorite typewriter is too much, but this is not a reason to forbid the child to get angry. However, children, who are taught from the very beginning to be comfortable, usually do not fall on the floor and do not hit others - their negative emotions are blocked, prohibited from the very beginning. Even before they have learned to speak, they know for sure that getting angry, upset or wanting more is not possible, because it upsets the mother (and it is very scary to upset the parent, because it threatens to lose love), because it is fraught with an emotional response from the outside adults. Therein lies a global injustice: it is an adult who can accept and experience the child's affect, give it a name, help the child live it and let it go. For children, adult experiences and negative emotions are an unbearable burden, and they should not be responsible for maternal or paternal experiences - but this is more often the case. Shame and guilt are common tools that parents use to make their children comfortable. You upset mom, angered dad, disappointed grandmother - this is very scary, and in order to cope with this fear, it is easier for a child to learn to “not feel”. Only unpleasant emotions never go anywhere. They cannot be blocked forever, they just transform into other forms - often auto-aggression, self-deprecating guilt, or fear of consequences.

To be successful and enjoy it, you need to want more. You need to be able to refuse something and refuse something to others. You need to be able to sometimes get angry, feel anger, show aggression - in a socially acceptable form. You should not be afraid to change something around you. Even if it sometimes means being uncomfortable.

For yourself or for someone else?

Not all people who come for success actually want it. No, really. We grew up in a world where we must strive to be the first, conquer new heights, strive and go forward. It seems natural and the only correct one. But if this becomes the cause of daily stress, pressure on yourself and self-flagellation, you should think - do you really want this? What for? For whom? Very often a person does not even know why he needs this mythical success. He knows that he needs to strive upward, without even thinking what exactly it will give him (or he seems to know, but the goals do not really seem attractive enough to him).

The most commonplace options are when a person tries to prove something to his parents or other significant people in this way, to deserve love or recognition, to get the right to his own existence. But there are also quite bizarre constructions - for example, when a person is sure that without certain achievements he will receive the right to want something else. As a child, the reward system works - you get an A, you can watch a cartoon on the weekend. But sometimes, in adulthood, we substitute goals for means that actually don't match each other in any way. For example, if you want a happy family, first become the head of your department. If you want to go on vacation - lose weight first. Etc.

If you want to get a candy, it makes no sense to focus all your efforts on making a three-course dinner first - no one promised that they would give candy for borscht, and wouldn't it be easier to find ways to get these sweets. If your goal is not to achieve success in a specific business, but in the mythical bonuses that you expect from this success - it is worth considering how you can get these bonuses directly. Often the “bonuses” are existential - what we really want is love, respect, attention, or acceptance. And it seems to us that we will receive them in exchange for hard work and success in certain endeavors, which in themselves are not interesting to us. But if you believe that you do not deserve love and acceptance without one or another certificate of achievement, you risk not receiving them even after all the peaks have been conquered. Or receive, but in the wrong form, in the wrong form, or simply remain unsatisfied with the result.

Acrophobia

Acrophobia is a fear of heights. But sometimes we use this term as a metaphor, implying a fear of a completely different kind - fear of success, increasing, improving the quality of life. Briefly, the thesis that can describe the self-awareness of people with such fear can be formulated as follows: do not climb too high.

And here, too, there can be a variety of interpretations and reasons - the feeling that a person does not deserve high posts or high salaries, an imposter complex, fear of falling down and disappointment, horror before being exposed.

Sometimes parents from the very beginning instruct their children to “be more invisible” - not to climb forward, not to be carried over, not to take on unnecessary responsibility. Sometimes these habits are formed in the course of life in a team. One way or another, striving upwards is also a willingness to take on more and more risks, to accept more and more responsibility - and not everyone and not always are ready for this. Fear of consequences, refusal of responsibility, fear of change are frequent companions of stagnation and refusal to develop. Finding and working with the causes of these fears is a much more effective and effective method than looking for motivating courses or trying to "force yourself" to do something.