We often ask too little of ourselves and doubt our ability to succeed in the future based on our previous struggles.
These techniques will help you break through your limits:
- Decide what you will no longer tolerate from yourself. You put up with a lot from yourself. The late-night snacking, procrastination, and making excuses for not making it to the gym regularly may be common scenarios in your life. When you accept poor behavior from yourself, you’ll get poor results.
- Make a list of all the things you will no longer do or accept. If you want to rise to a new level in any endeavor, it’s important to eliminate attitudes and behaviors that get in the way.
- Define your goals. Make your goals bigger and better and stick with them. Think about the worst parts of your life and start there. It’s the lowest-rated parts of your life that create your limits and stifle your happiness.
- Raise your standards. Most people set goals that are too small. Set bigger goals and then figure out how to attain them quicker. With a good enough plan and hard work, you can accomplish a lot quickly.
- Define the five most important behaviors for your future. What are five things you can do each day that will transform your life? Look to your goals for guidance. A few examples:
- Cold call or email at least 10 potential clients each day.
- Eat less than 2500 calories.
- Perform 50 pushups.
- Talk to one new person that could either be a potential friend or lover.
- Spend at least 30 minutes practicing the piano
- The things you do each day matter. If you look at your average current day, it’s easy to see why your life is exactly as it is. What can you do each day that will guarantee that next year will be amazing?
- Find a quality mentor. Good mentors can be hard to find, but it’s one of the best ways to rise above yourself.
- You think you know your weak spots, but you only see some of them. Your ego is hiding them from you.
- There may also be a few things you think you’re good at but aren’t.
- A mentor will be able to see the truth.
- Evaluate each day in writing. At the end of the day, make a list of the things you did right and those things you did wrong. Promise yourself to do fewer of the wrong things and more of the good things going forward.
- Learn. Determine the three things you need to learn this year to have a great year. Where are you lacking? What skills do you want to develop or strengthen? You should always be learning something, but ensure you’re learning what will matter the most.
- Enhance your ability to focus. If you can’t focus, you can’t accomplish much of anything. Try using a timer, learn to meditate, make lists, or try another method. The ability to focus comes with practice.
You know you can do better than you have been. We’d like to think there’s a secret to succeeding – a quick trick that will suddenly make our dreams come true. But the truth is uglier. It’s necessary to dig into your weaknesses and get to work on yourself.
Raise your expectations and personal standards. Evaluate yourself daily and find a mentor for help. You are your greatest enemy. Break through your self-imposed limits and success will be yours!
These 6 Steps will help you Erase Your Limits and Expand Your Comfort Zone:
Of all the valuable skills you’ll acquire, learning to deal effectively with discomfort is one of the most important. Consider all the times you’ve wanted to do something, but either never started or came up short. It’s likely that your inability to handle the resulting discomfort was the cause.
If you could handle discomfort better, you would never procrastinate, never quit a diet, exercise every day, and complete everything you ever wanted to accomplish.
Most of us avoid discomfort at all costs. It’s the biggest limiting factor for most people. But a little discomfort can be a good thing. Even a lot of discomfort is a good thing if you want to change your life quickly.
Unfortunately, avoiding discomfort quickly becomes a habit. You instantly feel better when you evade the thing that’s causing the discomfort. It becomes a preferred coping mechanism. It also self-imposes limits.
The good news is you can free yourself from these limits!
The key to mastering discomfort is to work at becoming more comfortable in challenging situations. As you move forward, you increase your comfort zone little by little. Before you know it, you’ve erased the limits you had previously set for yourself.
Follow this process to become more comfortable with discomfort and set yourself free:
- Start with something that’s difficult, but not too difficult. Learning Chinese is very difficult. But eating all your vegetables isn’t too difficult. Starting a gentle exercise program isn’t too difficult, either.
- Start with something that will enhance your life, but won’t be too challenging to implement or take an excessive amount of time.
- Start slowly. If you’re going to start exercising, start with just 5-10 minutes. You can add a little bit of time each day or week. If you try to start with 60 minutes, it will probably seem too overwhelming to even get started.
- Why not give yourself the best chance to succeed?
- Push through a little discomfort. Maybe you’re working on keeping the house clean. You’ll likely feel a strong urge to quit just 10 minutes into your cleaning regimen. Keep working. A little later, you may want to quit again, but keep going. The third time, allow yourself to actually stop.
Try to do this with everything. Avoid letting yourself quit anything the first time you get the urge to stop.
- Observe your discomfort. A great way to deal with discomfort is to simply observe it. How does it feel? How you try to avoid the situation that is causing the discomfort? Do you try to distract yourself with other activities?
You might rationalize reasons why it would be better not to continue. Avoid falling into that pattern.
Study your discomfort like a dispassionate observer. By simply observing and not becoming emotionally involved with your discomfort, you’ll likely notice that your discomfort lessens.
- Find a way to smile. Smiling is a key component of learning to be okay with discomfort. It’s hard to be miserable when you’re smiling. When the going gets rough, take a deep breath and force yourself to smile.
- Continue to push a little further the next time. Just like with exercising, you can always do just a little bit more the next time. Each time you work through a little more discomfort, it gets easier and easier. Your capacity to deal with discomfort will expand quickly.
You can learn to be comfortable with discomfort. Think of all the amazing things you could accomplish if being uncomfortable didn’t stop you! There really isn’t much you couldn’t do. Those that avoid discomfort the most tend to end up with the most uncomfortable lives. By accepting and managing your discomfort, you can build the life you desire.
Start small, but get started. Being a little uncomfortable never hurt anyone. Master your discomfort and you’ll set yourself free.
I hope this article was helpful to you. There is no better way to be successful than to cultivate and master self-discipline. Download my FREE eBook: “Self-Mastery is Key: Master These 10 Habits and Become Master of Your Life.” Just CLICK HERE!