Setting yourself up for failure

When you walk into any classroom setting, you notice people sitting at the front of the hall and people sitting at the back of the hall. Was their choice of sitting position random, or did they deliberately choose where they wanted to sit in the hall? From observation, you realize that it doesn’t matter where the entrance into a hall is, people systematically choose where they want to be seated and how far they want to be from the person giving the lesson. It's fair to say that your sitting position can influence your success rate.

Another factor which influences our success rate is how proactive we are with the study, how much we ask questions and seek to know better what is being taught to us. There are certainly a lot of factors which influence our success rate for which we are not in control of, things like motivation, the competence of the person passing the lesson, the environment and much more. The few ones we are in control of however are still very detrimental to our overall success and can weight the balance one way or the other.

What you realize now is that something as simple as our sitting position in a hall can influence your success rate or retention rate, do you think people will deliberately choose a better position to increase their success rate when they realize this? Certainly not!

Even though people might know the right thing to do, that doesn’t always lead them to do the right thing.

Intentional or not

There is something known as self sabotage which is when an individual obstructs their own goals, they know what they want and yet still stop themselves from having it. There might be a million things you might want right now, but I am sure you are not willing to put in the hard work necessary to get them. For one reason or the other, you stop yourself from having what you want and justify it with any reason possible.

This happens on a subconscious level, most people don’t realize how independent their brain gets. There is a part of your brain which isn’t in your control and whose job is to protect you even from your own self, so this part of your brain will stop you when you try to do things which take you out of your comfort zone. Your happiness and success is found on the other way of hard work, struggle and perseverance, but your brain won’t allow you to go through struggle.

You are your worst enemy

There is one obstacle here, one problem and one wall, it's something you don’t realize because the problem is the person in the mirror, but it's difficult for you to even comprehend how you could be your biggest problem. When looking for the enemy you never think of looking in the mirror, it is always someone else, it's always something, it's always somebody else. How could it be possible that you do things to hold yourself back? That's just illogical, and your brain can’t comprehend, but that's just what is happening here.

You chose to sit at the back of the class where you couldn’t hear the lesson well, you chose not to proactively study and prepare for the exam etc. No matter how much you try to pin it on the circumstances which are beyond your control, you can’t deny that a lot of them are in your control, whether they are easy to do or not. The proof is that you have others in the same circumstances doing the exact same thing and thriving, so who is the real enemy here? The circumstances or you. Something is certain, you bear more blame than you are willing to give yourself, and you’d rather be in denial than to admit you are your worst enemy.

Doing what it takes

There is a way to achieve things, to get the success you so desire, to make things happen. It's easy to say a person is born a great leader, an amazing businessman or an incredible player, but the truth of the matter is that these people worked hard to overcome their own limitations, to destroy the enemy within in order to get to that state where nothing can stop them, not even themselves. There are rules and principles which govern most parts of society and if you want to thrive in these parts then you have to abide by them, you can’t expect to be a great public speaker with a shy character, neither can you hope to have a thriving business when you don’t even know how a business works.

What I notice very often are people who want to stay the same and yet want to achieve success in a certain way. To grow is to change !

Thanks for reading ??