What can you do when you find that you are your own worst enemy?
It's hard to get away from yourself.
People put limits on their lives. In fact, people seem embarrassed about having or articulating dreams and seem more devoted to squelching them than to pursuing them. They are bold about issues of scant personal import, but timid about the desires of their hearts. They secretly long to do more but remain frozen, passive.
Underachievement and being your own worst enemy, even in its extreme form is an extension of such commonplace lapses as not finishing that book, putting off a change of diet, taking morning brisk walks, or repeatedly falling behind in correspondence. We seem to be much more interested in prodigies and phenoms than in people who make steady progress toward goals.
To avoid hard work we have lowered our standards and lower standards have infiltrated our institutions and become woven parts of our public policy and part of the fabric of our daily lives. We have come to a point where our expectations are so low that aspersions are cast aside when someone puts out exceptional effort.
Diminished standards surround us, encouraging us to lower our expectations for our own lives and our emotional investment in them, for the sake of our own sanity. We lower our expectations of, and demands for, relationships, self-knowledge, intellectual conversation, and most of all personal achievement and happiness. When children at school, no one wants to be seen as the dorky book worm and teachers pet, despite the fact that we may have worked our asses off to become such.
Virtually no one escapes these influences.
In a popular culture fascinated by the instantaneous, gadgets, and the promise of all things labor-saving,things like grand ideas wither and heroic pursuits pass from fashion.
When I look closely at my own life, i too sometimes delay things that are important to me, postponing them for an indefinite future moment, that I also often mute my own passions or hold too narrow a vision of what is possible, limiting my own full potential. I have come to recognize that no matter how productive people eventually become, at some point nearly all of us deal with hesitancies or other obstacles on our way to doing whatever it is we do.
The biggest difference between those who do and those who do not, is how they choose to deal with the obstacles they face. Those who do not combat personal obstacles and cultural trends become numbed and disengaged, inured to lower quality, adept at settling for less, and, as in Plato's allegory of the cave, content with shadow approximations of what they actually need to satisfy their deepest longings. Those who have the greatest potential are often the most vulnerable to self defeating and limiting thought patterns and behaviors.
Change is possible. To simply desire it, however is not enough. As a minimum it requires a clear out decision and a commitment to work hard for a while. Those who limit themselves habitually avoid exactly such a commitment. To make the most of your potential , you must revise these ingrained habits and develop new skills, and you can only do this if you have a clear idea of where you are going and a planned approach in how to get there. Otherwise, like a housefly that keeps hurtling itself against a windowpane, you will repeatedly encounter invisible barriers that can not be broached.
We can be particularly resistant to change when it threatens to alter what we believe about ourselves. In his 1948 book The theory of Self-consistency, Prescott Lecky argues that people prefer retaining a consistent view of who they are as to changing that view, even if the change would be a positive one. The idea of who we are resides at the center of our reality. It is part of the glue that holds your reality together. You believe that if you know anything, you know yourself. You feel that you know how you will behave and what is possible for you.
What you actually know is what you have habitually believed and how you have consistently behaved. Police investigations have long relied on the consistency and continuity of human behavior to solve crimes. You have a modus operandi. It seldom varies and changes. You tie your shoes the same way, use the same foot to enter the bathtub or shower, have the same habitual thoughts and feelings, and repeat the same crimes.
Your feelings become your thoughts.
Your thoughts become your actions.
Your actions become your habits.
Your habits become your character.
Your character determines who you are.
To change you have to set aside preconceptions and open to new, sometimes surprising possibilities. Here is the truth about change.
Change is easier when you selectively focus your efforts. Trying to pull off multiple changes simultaneously is the kiss of death. Do not overreach. You can not change everything in one fell swoop, if for no other reason than that your attention is limited.
Be modest and be methodical. Setting too many simultaneous goals is tossing beanbags from the back of the room, a classic self defeating behavior.
To change you must adopt an appropriate long range perspective. Speed seems important, but it is not always the point. Disappointing early results do not mean you are on the wrong path any more than exciting early results mean you are on the right path. An appropriate long range perspective involves persistence and utter devotion to making permanent changes, instead of finding quick fixes and band-aiding a problem.
To change is to permanently alter what you do. Change requires that you persist even when your efforts are having no apparent effect other than making you feel disrupted, inconvenienced, and bothered. Change takes time and early results are often unpleasant.
Chaos and setbacks are often proof that you are changing not the opposite. By luck, advice or reasoning, many people begin on a path that would eventually lead them to successful change but misunderstand that the initially chaotic results are actual evidence that progress is under way. Change involves altering routines and new routines may feel disturbing until you grow accustomed to them.
Change requires that you become fully engaged for a period of contemplation, preparation, and decisive action, followed by continuing maintenance. Change makes demands on you until you lock in new habits, but it is an investment worth making, because staying where you are has a steep price.
Change is not something that happens to you but something you do. Change stems from making an effort to act. If you wait for change to come along or for circumstances to change, you will keep waiting. Waiting for fortune to smile on you is not a method for change, fortune has already smiled. You are already gifted with the ability to make things happen. Waiting only postpones it.
Change is a learning process, you learn how to do something differently. This is nothing new to you, you have changed and adapted your entire life. Failure is bound to happen, when you learn, you make attempts and mistakes, and when you learn from your mistakes, you gradually redefine your skills.
Change builds on itself. By making one well-selected change, you make another one more likely. When you make an initial change , you cross a threshold not only for that area of change but also for change in general. When you cross any threshold, you lower it and it is easier to cross the next time. If you acquire essential basic skills, you can go on to develop more complex skills much more easily. Basic math, then Algebra, then Geometry and thus forth.
You can not change the past. If your life has had a mediocre plot so far, you can not go back and revise it as if it were a book. You can however, change the direction of your story from this minute forward.
The problem is not, has never been and never will be who you are. The problem has always been what you choose to do.
