What Gets in the Way is Important
“Look where you want to go,” I often say to my coaching clients. “Without looking at what you want, you won’t recognize it when it’s in front of you.” Sometimes I even say, “Unless you have a dream and know what it looks like, you can’t create it.”
Opposite ends of the day: SunsetDawn by Roshni Kakad, from her blog: http://roshnikakad.blogspot.com/2011/...
The opposite is also true. If you constantly imagine failure, know what it looks like, and keep looking for it, you will find it. And yet, I don’t believe in the more militant portions of the Law of Attraction that say if you even consider a Plan B, if you even think about a block to success, you will fail because you manifested failure just thinking about it.
I think it takes a lot more than that. I think people who are afraid of failure spend a lot more time planning what they will do when they fail than they do about how to succeed.
As a coach, I think that failure is important. We can learn from failure. The important thing we can learn is what gets in our way. Is it poor planning? Is it fear? Is it a feeling of “not enough”? What gets in our way in one part of our life is almost always the same thing that gets in the way in another part of our life.
People often believe that once you find your stumbling block and name it, well, you just pull it out by the roots and then you are done. After that, a perfect life awaits. If you are chuckling, you would enjoy a day in my coaching chair. Many, many people believe that recognizing a problem is the same as solving it.
A problem is a situation that requires change to alter the situation. And most people don’t want change. Even if they recognize the problem, they believe the outcome will be different if they ignore it again. Or they are embarrassed that the same problem has come back. I think that one reason people fail on the way to success is that they don’t want to address the same problem in a different suit, so they say it is a different problem. What gets in the way is often the same problem.
What holds us up, what causes us to slip and fall, is the same problem that’s part of your story. We know our story so well, we have developed a pattern of living by it. And that includes the thing that gets in the way, too. Maybe it’s quitting too early, maybe it’s making an assumption about worthiness. Whatever gets in your way has been doing it for a long time.
This is the shocking part: It’s the other end of something useful and one of your best characteristics. It always is. Love details? Good at quality control? Could it be your problem is procrastination? (It often is with perfectionists.) Well organized? Got your to-do list under control? Take a look at what happens when that gets too much. Are you a micro-manager? A bit obsessive?
Our good points are always linked to those characteristics we’d like to get rid of. What gets in the way is too much of a good thing. And then it’s not good any more. Take a close look at it; you’ll have it with you for a long time. Don’t try to pull it out by the roots, but do try to dial it back. What happens next is that you will have to make more room for success.
–-Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach and art journaler who teaches what she knows.
Filed under: Creativity, In My Life, Recovering Perfectionists Tagged: faults, on the way to success, postaday2012, story
