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What Is Holding You Back?

By Karl Staib on October 7, 2010 13 Comments
Last updated on October 16, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Karl Staib of Work Happy Now.

Are you resisting doing something that you know will help your career?

You probably should be working on something important right now that will skyrocket your life. You want some great idea to get everything to click. Some magic solution.

First, there are no magic solutions. I know you know this, but it must be said. I won’t be that blogger who promises you grandeur and then changes nothing.

A Little Story

I recently broke through a mental barrier. I was lost in my business. The drowning business owner syndrome was in full effect.

Charlie’s coaching was actually very instrumental in helping me break through. He asked the right questions that helped me figure out what I was doing wrong.

See, I have a passion for work happiness, the thing is I am more focused on a habit/personal development level, rather than being focused on helping corporations create a better work environment. Well, I am interested in this too, but it’s hard to do this type of work unless you have a book, make lots of connections, and love to cold call businesses. I don’t.

I was missing the personal connection with my people. When I gave talks to organizations, I often wondered how many people were going to apply my advice. I knew that I needed to work with passionate people who wanted to take their lives to a higher level.

That’s when I opened my Superpower Coaching practice. I struggled at first, but the transition has been a wonderful learning experience. The response from clients has been fantastic, but that’s not even the best part: my confidence and my engagement in my work have multiplied.

Fear Keeps Us From Thriving

I was afraid to take my business in a new direction because of all the hard work I had put in during the last two years. This fear was holding me back.

It’s interesting to watch how my emotions dictate my actions. I didn’t even realize that I was holding back until someone pointed it out to me.

If you’re wanting to stop letting emotions dictate your actions, here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Ask the Painful Questions

It all starts by figuring out how to ask the right questions. The right questions are usually painful because they put you in an uncomfortable situation.

This means digging into your emotions. This can be a scary place. I know I have avoided many projects because I was afraid of messing up. I didn’t want to ask myself why I was avoiding certain projects, so I kept doing my usual work and hating the results.

If you can’t do it yourself, like me, then hire someone to help you break free of what’s holding you back. When I started talking to coaches and other people who could help me break out of my comfort zone, I finally started to multiply my business.

2. Jump in the River of Pain

Once you start asking the right questions, you have to give the answers. This will hurt. It hurt me because it meant I had to take my business in a new direction.

My answers forced me to see my reality. I couldn’t keep going along the same path and expect great results. Once I accepted this truth I needed to take action.

3. Swim Your Butt Off

Taking action is the key to any change. Want to be a better writer? Then write until your fingers hurt. Want to be a more successful business owner? Then get in there and learn how to improve your business.

You have to learn to enjoy the river of pain because it never ends. Suffering is a part of our lives, so we we may as well work with it now rather than waiting for it to go away.

If we can stop letting fear guide our choices and we can transform our aversion to pain into a spring board, then we can stop holding ourselves back.

4. Transform the Pain

The easiest and most useful step to take when trying to transform your pain is to immerse yourself in your emotions. The more you begin to see the emotional patterns that keep popping up, the easier it will be to make choices that encourage you to stop procrastinating in your work.

I like to keep a one sentence daily journal to track my wins and losses throughout a week. Every Sunday I review my progress and refocus my energy. At the end of each month I do another review of my progress. These daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reflections help me understand more about the choices I make.

When I keep resisting work that I know will help my career I always see the pattern of fear emerge. I sit with this fear and listen. I listen then talk to this little scared dude within me. We talk about the results that I will get if I don’t do this thing vs if I do this thing today.

I try to make the decision based on whether the results are more important than my fear. 99% of the time the results take precedence. It’s why I started my blog. It’s why I go to SXSW. It’s why I took my business in a new direction.

Your Turn

How do you overcome your resistance to projects and work that you know will grow your career?

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About Karl Staib

Karl Staib is the author of Bring Gratitude. His passion for creating and maintaining a gratitude practice has no bounds. His goal is to get you and ten million other people to start a gratitude practice because it quiets the inner bully and builds a more resilient mindset. You can learn more about how to build a more resilient mindset over at Bring Gratitude.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dandy says

    October 7, 2010 at 12:04 pm

    Great post. This just doesn’t apply to work, but anything in life. Sometimes you have to really get fed up at where you are to start to take action. You’re right about needing to see the reality by asking the right questions. Thanks for the insight!!

    Reply
    • Karl Staib - Work Happy Now says

      October 7, 2010 at 2:54 pm

      Hi Dandy,
      The right questions are so important. When we get to the heart of our fear it’s so much easier to understand our lack of motivation then use this information to fuel us into action.

      Reply
  2. Chris O'Byrne says

    October 7, 2010 at 4:03 pm

    Karl, this is such an important topic to post about. There is so much out there about techniques and low level solutions to creating a living (and thereby, in most people’s minds, finding happiness). Happiness, like spiritual awakening, is something that is always there as a part of who we are. It’s like wearing a blindfold and then saying we’re looking for sight. It’s always there, we just have to remove what’s blocking it. You address the issues that are more important then mere techniques and I appreciate that.

    Reply
  3. Ron says

    October 8, 2010 at 4:33 am

    Hi Karl,
    I found in my case my biggest fear was of my ‘critic’ and i wouldn’t do things because i was always afraid it would pull the rug out from under me.I work with it everyday and have found that listening to it,not with my head but with my heart gives me insight into it so i can learn to take it with me on my ventures.
    Cheers Ron

    Reply
    • Karl Staib - Work Happy Now says

      October 8, 2010 at 8:05 am

      Hi Ron,
      The inner critic I like to think of as my “arch nemesis.” It’s more fun that way. I believe we have to form a strong relationship with this voice because once we understand our inner critic we can use it to help guide our actions.

      Reply
  4. Slava says

    October 8, 2010 at 5:48 am

    Karl,

    I want to politely disagree with your conclusion about “asking the painful questions”. You probably did something that helped you, but I did you really think “let me ask myself a painful question!!” before that?

    No matter how big of an individual you are – there’s still a big chunk of primitive brain in you that blocks your higher brain from acting when it expects pain. Humans are naturally avoiding pain at all costs. Asking people to go into pain is just asking them to stop thikning rationally.

    That’s not science of motivation, that’s basic physiology.

    I think you discovered something, but your conclusion about how you did it might need a little more work – right not it isn’t something that is going to motivate people.

    Actually, now that I think about it – people are really bad at asking themselves the harsh questions, that’s why they invented coaches, trainers and mothers 🙂

    Reply
    • Charlie says

      October 8, 2010 at 6:59 am

      Hi Slava! Thanks for your great comment here. I’m not sure that Karl meant that the questions have to be painful – but just that the questions themselves often have painful answers.

      Having worked with a lot of clients on these very issues, I can attest that it’s the questions that have answers that are anchored deep in an emotion that are usually the best to get to quickly. That emotion is a source of either away-from or towards motivation, and can be of use. At the very least, it’s important to know what stings and what doesn’t.

      Where I absolutely agree with you, though, is that we each have different motivational orientations. Were I working with you, I might find that you respond more to towards motivations, and that would script our relationship. I know Karl’s stress-point around fear, so I could simply ask him what he’s most afraid of.

      Yep, that’s why they invented coaches. Good ones can sort through the questions to ask and know what to do with the answers. 🙂

      Reply
      • Slava says

        October 8, 2010 at 4:56 pm

        Charlie,

        > Yep, that’s why they invented coaches.

        Yeah, actually I should’ve scraped the whole comment and just leave that line 🙂

        It’s just that I don’t really believe that people could ask themselves those questions. I know I couldn’t even though I often really push myself. But thinking “Hey, what’s that question you’re afraid to ask yourself” seeming completely blanks my memory and get’s me to some happy place where fairies fly and everybody happy. 🙂

        Still great post and thanks for the response!

        Reply
  5. Yael Grauer says

    October 9, 2010 at 7:21 am

    Good post. I think one of the challenging aspects of this for me is that I don’t realize when I’m *not* asking the painful questions. This probably also somehow ties in with the need to learn to be more aware of boomerangs.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Tweets that mention What is holding you back? -- Topsy.com says:
    October 7, 2010 at 12:14 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Charlie Gilkey and Adam King, Naomi Niles. Naomi Niles said: RT @CharlieGilkey: Just published @workhappynow's guest post: "What is holding you back?" http://bit.ly/diHdjE Hint: fear. 🙂 […]

    Reply
  2. Tweets that mention What is holding you back? -- Topsy.com says:
    October 7, 2010 at 1:01 pm

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  3. #WeeklyMarketingGems and #MyWeeklyRecap « Marketing Matters | Jason Sokol says:
    October 9, 2010 at 5:39 am

    […] What is Holding You Back? – Karl Staib shares his thoughts on what might be holding you back from being successful. Are you stuck? If so, Karl has some great advice to share. […]

    Reply
  4. Progress toward a Simpler Life « Mass Minimalism says:
    December 15, 2010 at 12:47 pm

    […] What is Holding you Back? (by Productive Flourishing): See Point #4. […]

    Reply

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