How Do I Do Better At Not Being My Own Greatest Obstacle?
What do I do to get out of my own way when I know I’m my greatest obstacle?
Sometime back in the late 1990s, I began to explore what many deem the hooky-spooky. Energies, Reiki, conscious reality creation, manifestation, positivity, and general mindful self-awareness.
Through all of that, I started to really get to know myself better. I saw both who I was and who I desired to be. To that end, I made more conscious decisions and choices, then worked to alter my attitude and approach to better control the things that I could.
There were a lot of fits and starts, half-baked attempts, failures, challenges, successes, frustrations, thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. Particularly in the last 10 years, I’ve really worked to be the most ideal me that I could be.
And yet – there is still a lot of lack, doubt, sense of insufficiency, and other negatives in my head and heart. Keeping my eye turned towards the positive end of the flexible cylinder between positive and negative isn’t easy.
On further analysis, I can see that it always comes down to the same problem. I am my own greatest obstacle.
What does being my own greatest obstacle mean?
Life is seldom a straight, easy, smooth, challenge-free path. It’s full of twists and turns, bumps, ruts, difficulties, and obstacles. Lots of things happen outside my control regularly that speak to this (and that’s true for everyone).
What if the greatest obstacle of all, though, is me?
Like everyone else, I absorb and have absorbed a lot of information subconsciously. As a child, how my parents and other authority figures acted made an impression in my subconscious mind. Those impressions, when reinforced, became unwitting beliefs and values.
What are unwitting beliefs and values? Ideas and concepts that we accept as truth subconsciously without actively, consciously being aware of them.
For example – my mom (meaning well) often expounded upon the idea that the greatest money-makers were doctors, lawyers, merchant-chiefs, and the like. To be a success and make all the money, that was the gateway.
Along with this idea that I heard or was otherwise exposed to multiple times as an impressionable child – other notions of insufficiency were attached to it.
I did not choose that path for myself. Becoming a doctor or lawyer held zero appeal, and unwitting impressions about business chiefs and the like from my father made that an unappealing path, too.
But rather than choose a path – I allowed confusion, uncertainty, and doubt to drive me for about two decades.
Once I learned this and began to work with conscious awareness to make new choices and decisions to change – I came across the obstacles of my own making I’d placed in my way.
My subconscious beliefs and values are deeply rooted. Hence, when they present an obstacle, it is not immediately obvious. Thus, doubt, uncertainty, and self-sabotage become all-too-frequent obstacles.
How do I overcome these obstacles?
To be perfectly blunt – this is a major challenge.
However – I have a pretty good idea of the process required to make this happen so I can overcome the obstacles.
It looks something like this:
- Be here, now. The first step to any active action in my life must be mindfulness. Unless I am practicing conscious awareness of my thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions – my subconscious is doing the driving. And then those deep-seated unwitting beliefs and values become obstacles.
- Identify what I’m thinking and feeling. This will make me be here, now, and let me see the obstacles.
- Identify the obstacles. Once seen, the obstacles need to be identified. Am I expressing lack and insufficiency with my thoughts and feelings? Am I self-sabotaging? What in my head, heart, and soul is causing me distress?
- Address the obstacles. Recognizing and acknowledging the obstacles lets me address them and mindfully take new actions to work with them for change.
- Disconnect the obstacles from my ego. The unwitting beliefs and values that become obstacles cling to the ego. They become part of how we project ourselves to the world without as well as to our inner selves. Conscious awareness of them allows us to disconnect from them.
- Thank them for protection. Most of the time our obstacles have been protecting us – that’s the egotistical attachment. We need to thank them to release them.
- Consciously choose anew. Conscious choices and active decisions are necessary to overcome self-made obstacles.
Easy? No. Worthwhile? Absolutely. Mindfulness is the only way to know my thoughts, feelings, intentions, and how they drive my actions. Hence, mindfulness is the only way to remove the obstacles of my own making.
Actively make choices and decisions
It is very, very easy to live subconsciously. Let the rote and routine of daily life do the driving. And I do not doubt that for some people this is perfectly satisfactory.
But not me. No, I have a desire to live my life on my terms. But the only way to do that is by practicing practical mindfulness.
Rather than being subconscious and letting life just happen, I must make active choices and decisions. However – if I do so from a place of lack, scarcity, and/or insufficiency – I’m already working at a deficit. That’s because lack, scarcity, and insufficiency are negatives that disempower.
That’s how advertisers sell us shit we don’t need. They convince us the lack of ‘x’, or the scarcity of ‘y’ should matter to us and the impression we make on others.
But similarly, this is how we sell ourselves on shit we don’t desire. If I don’t do ‘x’ I am lacking; when I don’t do ‘y’ I am insufficient. Which is how we make ourselves into our own greatest obstacles.
I know that what I do is not the “norm”. But this is who I am. When I accept the not-positive (because they are not actively negative, per se) subconscious beliefs and values, I make them obstacles. Hence, I must make more active, mindful choices and decisions to recognize, acknowledge, then overcome the obstacles.
And this is an ongoing process. This means just because I succeed once – it won’t necessarily get easier the next time. It might require just as much work – or more – to succeed again.
But recognizing this is how I do better at not being my own greatest obstacle. And if I can do it – so can you.
Recognizing when I’m my own greatest obstacle isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct actions.
When I am having a difficult time making a change I desire – or living life on my preferred terms – I need to work with mindfulness to better recognize and acknowledge the obstacles that I have subconsciously created. Knowing that they are of my own making, I can use conscious awareness – here and now – of my thoughts, feelings, and intentions to alter my actions to do what I must to overcome these subconsciously placed, ego-reinforced obstacles. And you can do the same.
This empowers us – and in turn, our empowerment can empower others around us. That can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.
Choosing for ourselves employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for our lives.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, we can explore and share where we are between the extremes and how that impacts us here and now.
Lastly, the better aware we are of ourselves in the now, the more we can do to choose and decide how our life experiences will be. When that empowers us, it can also open those around us to their own empowerment. And that is, to me, a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.
This is the four hundred and forty-ninth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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