Category Archives: Self-Growth

Are You Afraid To Step Out And Do Your Thing?

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If given a choice, I could spend a lot of time focusing on my own growth.  Since I rate spiritual growth as my top personal value, it’s easy for me to devote lots of time to psycho-analysing myself, processing my issues and healing my pains.  Admittedly, it can get close to the level of self-indulgence if I don’t watch myself!  From time to time, I’m jolted to awareness of how self-centered I have been, to be focusing on my own inadequacies when I could be looking at how to help more people.  I then get redirected internally to make it less about me and more about others. 

This, of course, tends to happen when I’m in a period of having more free time than usual.  I think it’s healthy to focus on our own wellbeing first and foremost, but it’s also easy to cross the line of being excessive and self-indulgent. 

I see this in many others too.  Usually, it happens during a period of growth – perhaps following a disastrous event when you’re well into the recovery stages of picking up your pieces, and you’ve connected to a project that inspires you.  By your reckoning, this project will launch you into the world again, as your new, improved self.  It will mark your rebirth, of having survived and grown through an exceptionally tough time. 

The thing is, more often than not, people don’t end up launching themselves this way.  They get scared and stuck in this stage of feeling they’re not ready yet – there’s always more to work on, more to heal, more to improve about themselves, more skills to acquire, more this or that. 

As the years go by, they continue to wallow in how they’re still unpolished, imperfect, undeserving.  The groundwork gets worked on, edited, tweaked, improved, updated, upgraded, added on, simplified, expanded.  Meanwhile, they are still talking about some day being actually out there doing their thing. 

Their project has become more of a fantasy, a source of motivation that keeps their hopes alive via the promises it holds.  As long as it hasn’t been tested out there, it will remain a powerful potential, and God knows we hate to have our fantasies destroyed. 

But the price for this is the guilt you suffer from knowing you have procrastinated yet again.  Since there’s a part of you that truly wants to step out there and actualise your vision, whenever you stop yourself from doing so, you suffer the discomfort of knowing you have not been true to yourself. 

Every time we make an excuse not to step out, we add more guilt to our emotional baggage.  Every time we judge themselves as being not good enough yet, we die a little more inside.  The self-herating that accompanies such judgements can be very damaging to our self-esteem. 

It can be many years before someone actually takes the first step of stepping out into the arena, and sadly, many never make it to this stage.  Do you have a project you can’t seem to get off the ground because you’ve been stuck in a stage where you know you need to step out but feel you aren’t quite ready?  The good news is, no matter how long you’ve been sitting on your project, the point of power is now.  You can make empowered choices now to step out into the world and live in the glory of being you.      

1.  Shift Your Focus Onto Other People

Sometimes, focusing on our own inadequacies, or how we’re still not good enough, is actually the easy way out.  As much as I admire someone who is committed and dedicated to her own growth, I admire even more someone who stretches herself to have the courage to get out there and do her thing – whether it’s to facilitate that workshop, teach a yoga class, write that book, start dating again or start that business.  Sometimes, we need to stop working on ourselves internally and take our growth out there.  If you’re serious about growing, then demonstrate this to yourself by stepping out there.  There is where you’ll be stretched to grow optimally and achieve the most self-improvement.    

Shifting your focus onto others will bring you two benefits.  One, focusing on others can make your own problems seem less serious.  When you focus excessively on your own problems, your perception of your world will shrink until it seems as though there’s just you and your problems, within a constricted world.  When you take your focus away from yourself and to other people, it changes your perspective.  It allows you to see that there are others who are struggling with problems and to sympathise with their plight.  Knowing that you’re not alone in your suffering can be very healing.  Your empathy may even help alleviate their plight, and knowing you have contributed positively to another can connect you to your personal power which opens up a whole new world for you. 

Two, focusing on others will enable you to sharpen your vision and shape your role.  Make it less about you and more about others.  Focus on what you can do to help, support and benefit others.  Start to take notice of what the world around you needs and how you can contribute to make a difference. 

Stepping out of the place in which you’ve been struggling to find a solution may be just the thing you need to get unstuck.    

2.  Turn On Your Excuse Buster!

Decide to bust all your excuses from now on.  Everytime you catch yourself giving an excuse about how it’s not time yet to step out, expose your dishonesty.  Be ruthless and brutal in shredding all the excuses you give yourself to stay safe. 

Is it really true that you’re not good enough to step out yet?  Could you be finding the excuse to not be good enough?  Are you sabotaging the realisation of your project by using your excuses to channel your resources elsewhere rather than to your project?    

You might not be totally aware of how you’re sabotaging yourself with your excuses.  By exposing your dishonesty, you elevate your behaviours to a conscious level so that you can be more in control of the choices you make. 

What’s left in the absence of your excuses?  I want you to stay with the discomfort of thinking you’re going to step out there.  The fear you feel is different from the gut-level fear that protects you from real danger – it’s a mixture of fear and excitement.  Stay with the discomfort until it expands into feelings of excitement. 

Most of the time, we react as soon as we feel uncomfortable.  By staying with the feeling long enough for it to evolve, you change your reference of the idea of being out there doing your thing. 

3.  Step Out As Your Imperfect Self

You may be holding back because you feel you need to be perfect before you share yourself with others.  Understandably, you want to present the best version of yourself to the world.  But the best way to improve yourself is by stepping out as your imperfect self. 

That place you want to be?  You’ll never get there unless you step out now.  When you’re chasing perfection, you’re pursuing something that doesn’t exist.  It’s a fact that as humans we never stop growing and having opportunities to work on ourselves.  If you’re invested in the idea of being perfect someday and holding yourself back before that day comes, you’ll never reach your dreams. 

Most of the time, our fears get blown out of proportion.  We magnify our flaws, imagining others will do the same.  Yet others would probably give it 1% of the attention we give it. 

Furthermore, your flaws make you more human in the eyes of others.  They make you seem more reachable, relatable, and they give you more depth, colour and character.  You can improve and grow in front of an audience.  The energy with which you invest to hide your flaws can translate to a sense of tightness around you and emotional unavailability.  Letting go of wanting to be perfect can make you seem more authentic and sincere, allowing you to form more genuine relations with those you interact with.   

4.  Play Big, Don’t Stay Small

Another reason you may be holding back is the fear of being judged as not good enough.  It comes from believing that what you have to give isn’t good enough.  Whilst striving for high standards is an admirable quality, it can also stop us from taking the emotional risk to step forward into the playing field.  Sometimes, we reconcile this by playing it safe: we stay small instead of playing full-on, hoping we won’t attract any untoward attention that would crush our dreams. 

If you’re true to your dream, it cannot be destroyed.  This means continuing to believe in your dream and not allowing yourself to be defeated or give up too soon, even when you’re getting negative feedback.  It means having the maturity to understand that rejection is part and parcel of taking the risk to present yourself to the world; instead of being discouraged by rejections, you use them to point you to where you need to grow.  You become interested in the response you generate, instead of dreading the outcome.  Accept that there will likely be negative as well as positive response – if you insist on not getting any negative response at all, you may never take the step to actualise your dream.   

As the saying goes, good enough is good enough.  It pays to put in lots of time and energy to work on creating and honing your idea before you launch yourself, but after a certain point, you just got to get it out there. 

And when you do step out, step out fully.  Not in the sense of giving a first-time performance to a thousand people or nothing at all.  If you’re an aspiring singer, you could start as small as inviting five of your friends to a free performance at a house.  Stepping out fully is about being committed to what you’re doing.  Sing your heart out in front of your five friends.  Give your best.  When you step out, you’re either in or you’re out. 

It’s better to be there 100 percent for a small crowd than to be ‘kind of’ there for a thousand people.  But playing big does involve increasing the scale of what you do when you’ve mastered the level you started at.  To stay at this level is to resist stretching beyond your comfort zone and stop growing. 

5.  Use the Power Of Comparison

As scary as it may seem, stepping out is probably not the scariest thing for you to do.  The trouble is, we tend to compare it with what’s less scary to us – e.g. it’s less scary to not have to step out because we imagine the vulnerability we would feel if we did.  Of course, we’re bound to choose the less scary option.  But suppose you compared it with what’s scarier to you. 

Think of something that absolutely horrifies you if you were in that situation – something that is scarier than stepping out.  It could be something totally unrelated, such as a phobia.  Now notice how by comparison the idea of stepping out is significantly less scary. 

What this does is it puts your fear into perspective and gets you to think of it rationally.  It short-circuits your automatic response that is based on irrational fear and puts a different kind of energy around it.  

6.  Let Go of Regret

No matter how long you’ve procrastinated on your project, decide to let go of all regrets about not having done it earlier.  If you have a habit of keeping score of how much time you’ve wasted and generating guilty feelings, it becomes a block to taking action now.  We mistakenly believe that by beating ourselves up, we can redeem ourselves and feel less badly about ourselves.  But all it does is add to the guilt we  already feel. 

The most nourishing thing you can do is to cleanse yourself of all the negativity you hold around it.  Imagine releasing this toxic energy into the earth as the force of gravity draws it away from your body.  Release the critical, self-limiting thoughts you have and replace them with ideas about strength, hope and beauty.  Let go of your grip on guilt, hurt and regret – give them up to gravity.  Feel your entire system cleansed of all the should’s and shouldn’t’s.  From now on, you’re erased of the past, the history of how you’ve let yourself down.  Only the present matters.

Stepping out and doing our thing is such a deep, personal thing that it’s bound to come with a lot of resistance on our part.  But the greatest reward that comes from it is so sweet: the fulfilment that comes from giving of yourself.  You can be proud of the fact that you’ve stretched yourself to step out even when you felt you weren’t ready yet.  It’s like the advice parents often give to aspiring parents: “You’re never ready.” 

But you do it anyway. 

Why We Stay In Abusive Situations

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When working with clients, I see a common theme that crops up all the time, no matter what life issues they are struggling with at the time.  It is the feeling of being trapped, unable to find a way out of a situation.  Whether it is in a relationship, a job situation, or their home life, there is a huge emotional need to create change but also a daunting prospect of what taking steps towards change could entail.  These problems manifest as stresses, confusions, frustrations, worries and conflicts.  The word ‘stuck’ is very apt in these situations, as they struggle internally with wanting things to be different and yet are crippled by thoughts of negative consequences of change.

You may know of a friend or family member who complains about being in an emotionally abusive relationship.  Or a former colleague who still hates his job but can’t seem to find the resources to leave the job.  Or someone who continues to invest in the same business after repeatedly running into disappointments.  Perhaps they are hoping that things will be different this time, while continuing to stay in the same behaviours, or that things will improve on their own.  I call these and similar types of situation ‘abusive situations’ because you are in a position of being abused by others or by yourself (self-abusive).

If you find yourself stuck in an emotionally unhealthy situation, it may be time to honestly examine your motivations and begin breaking apart the energy of stuckness.  This will begin freeing you to move in a more fulfilling direction.  The first step is to commit to looking at your situation with total honesty.  That means owning up to the pain being in this situation is causing you.  What are you sacrificing or not honouring in yourself by being in this situation?

It also means acknowledging that it’s a choice you have made to stay in this situation.  Granted, it may seem that staying is the only option, at least for now.  That may or may not be true.  But the power comes from acknowledging the truth of why you are staying in this situation.  We tend to make excuses to justify a choice or behaviour – in short, we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better.  By looking at the real reasons you are still in this situation, you take your power back.  Honesty gives you power, even if the thought of being honest makes you feel weak at the moment.

Start by listing the external factors (e.g. money,  social obligation, a promise made to someone).  Then list the emotional factors (i.e. what are your fears?).  You’re likely to find that listing the emotional factors is more challenging than listing the practical reasons.  In fact, practical reasons are often used to cover up deeper, emotional motivations.  So let’s explore some of these motivations together.

Fear Of Being Judged

Perhaps you’re afraid that others might judge you for having made a mistake.  Again.  If you have an emotional history of having failed before, you may refrain from coming clean with others that things aren’t going all that well for you in the same department.  What transpires then is a painful need to hide what is really going on for you.  In time, you may even be driven to isolate yourself.

The thought of telling someone is too embarassing.  Or maybe you’re afraid that people might worry about you (after all, you’ve worked hard to change your life around after the last ‘failure’).  Were there sceptics around when you had first gone into this situation?  People whom you imagine are dying to find a chance to say to each other, “Well, that’s hardly surprising, is it?”

As real as it may seem, all these things are taking place in your imagination.  The mind has a tendency to blow things out of proportion.  We tend to believe that we are judged by more people and more harshly than in reality.  Accept that some people will judge you, but also acknowledge that some people will be supportive of you.  How we tend to focus entirely on one aspect and magnify it until it is the only thing we see in our reality!  Seek out those who support you rather than those who run you down just because you are about to take a courageous leap.

I’ve found that too few people can admit to having made a mistake.  There is nothing wrong with saying, “Looks like I made a mistake.”  It is honest, simple and humble.  Very few people would be able to pass negative judgements on that for long.

Punishing Yourself

How much of you staying in an abusive situation a way for you to punish yourself?  Perhaps you are harbouring feelings of guilt from your past, and you are now motivated by a need to allay your guilt by putting yourself through pain.  If this rings true for you, look at where this guilt is really coming from.  The true source of this guilt is seldom from a person involved in the current situation; rather, it’s likely to be displaced guilt projected onto the current situation, so that you feel compelled to ‘make up’ for whatever pain you perceive you are causing the person involved now.  A kind of displaced or misplaced loyalty.

In self-destructive acts, this person you are punishing yourself for might be you.  You are perpetrating abusive acts on yourself because you are punishing yourself for something you feel guilty about.  If you did or are doing something that conflicts with your ethical principles, you may take it upon yourself to correct that imbalance by punishing yourself.

Give yourself permission to forgive yourself by reflecting on the lessons you can learn from your mistakes.  How can you become a better person because of the experience?  By focusing on how more whole you are when you incorporate those lessons into who you are from now on, you can stop the self-beating and change your actions from self-abusing to self-loving.  Consciously choose self-loving acts to reinforce moving towards healing and forgiveness.  Ask yourself, “Is this act or thought self-loving or self-abusive?”

Disempowerment & The Fear Of Responsibility

Making empowered choices can be scary.  We fear stepping into our power because we fear the responsibility that comes from exercising our freedom.  If we allowed other people to make decisions for us, we won’t have to be responsible for making a wrong decision.  There may be a link to some deep-seated guilt from your past (see above), which may have made it feel safer for you to take a back seat in life.  Yet if this conflicts with your desire to be in control of your life, it will cause you to be resentful of who you leave the decisions to, as well as yourself for choosing not to honour your power.

We choose the route of disempowerment because we see getting empowered as hard work, that it’s too far a destination for us to reach.  Truth is, empowerment is our natural state.  It takes more resources to move away from empowerment than it does to move away from disempowerment.  We have to sacrifice our integrity, dishonour ourselves, compromise our values to become disempowered – and we suffer the pain of moving in such an unnatural direction away from our authentic self.  By reversing all those choices – by staying in integrity, honouring our truth, living in line with our values – we immediately return to an empowered state.

Low Self-Worth

Perhaps you suffer from low self-worth and you believe that being in abusive situations is what you deserve.  Even though you profess to want to change things, deep down you don’t believe that you deserve better than the situation you are in right now.  If you don’t work on improving your self-worth, you may forever devalue yourself in an attempt to fit in with your perception of yourself.

Holding yourself in poor light makes you feel unworthy of a better job, career, relationship, home, lifestyle, etc.  You may wonder at times why you still choose to move back to this and similar situations, thus perpetuating a cycle of self-abuse.  Raise the value of yourself in your eyes.  That is the only way out of this cycle.  If you don’t heal your relationship with yourself, you will eventually find yourself in the same situation.  Even if you take conscious actions to move into healthier situations, if the source of your low self-worth is not examined and healed, the results will only be fleeting.

If this seems too big a task for you to go through on your own, seek the help of a therapist.  There are also lots of effective techniques available in the self-help sector.  The technique is less important than your willingness and openness to healing and growing.  It may takes years of healing but every step is a progress in healing.  That journey can be a joyful adventure as you discover more and more beautiful aspects of yourself.

The Allure Of Staying Imprisoned

Sometimes, we choose to stay in helpless situations because we carry unresolved anger from our past.  Staying in abusive situations gives us an excuse to be angry.  It provides us with an outlet to express our sense of injustice.  Our past indignation becomes an unfinished business which allows us to feel justified in voicing that anger about being mistreated.  So we stay trapped by choosing to imprison ourselves, even when we really do have the resources to get out of it.  We focus on why we can’t get out of it, instead of why we can and must.

Sift through what’s right and wrong in this situation: same anger, rightful anger, but wrong context.  Put the anger back to where it belongs and deal with the anger in its appropriate context.  Knowing that you might have been motivated by a need to feel angry by putting yourself in this situation gives you the power to choose something better.

Along with the need to feel angry is the need to show others that you are being mistreated.  You may be waiting for a saviour because your saviour never came to your rescue last time and you still feel the unfairness of it.  By staying helpless, you ‘prove’ to others how wrong it all is – for someone to say, “Yes, this is unfair,” and maybe extend their love and support to you.

The saviour is you.  This time, there will be no saviour outside of you.  That is not to say that you should close the door to people who offer love and support to you.  It simply means that you take it upon yourself to step into your power and own up to your deeper, emotional motivation in this situation.  When you call it for what it is and deal with your emotions in their appropriate contexts, you relate to your world differently – a world where people are kind, compassionate, loving and supportive.

The Illusion Of Scarcity

If you’re buying into the illusion that the world is a place of scarcity – that resources and opportunities are in short supply – you would feel more fearful about getting out of your situation or “rocking the boat” in any way.  Fear of losing what you have, even if it’s shit.

The fear of running out of resources is such an intense emotional investment that it traps a person in awful situations.  It is a crippling fear that renders you stunned, incapacitated as your spirit withers away.  For all the awfulness that you go through by being in that situation, you put up with it because it is better than nothing.

Are you certain that you’ll be left with nothing?  What is nothing?  Money, house, friends?  How depleted is it really?  Is it really down to nothing?  Tell the truth about it.  Some money to last you a month is not nothing.  A less luxurious house is not nothing.  Two supportive friends is not nothing.  What about the things you will gain?  Having more integrity, self-honour, freedom, happiness, joy, peace is not nothing.  Where you lose out, you will gain in other aspects.  This is a given is you’re being true to yourself.

Trusting that the Right Thing Will Be Delivered

If being in this situation is causing you huge conflicts, start exploring whether you can make any changes while preserving the relationship, job, business, etc.  In other words, is it salvageable?  It may be a case of you learning to stand up for yourself and saying no to abusive people.  Do you have a pattern of people-pleasing?  How might you assert yourself and draw your boundaries to protect yourself from being abused?  Even if you invite unpleasant reactions when you say, “No more!” you come out of it with more dignity and self-respect.

If you are trying to preserve what isn’t working anymore, you risk running into great mental turmoils and eventually destroying yourself.  Maybe you have already been racking your brains and found very little hope for improvement within that context.  Walk away from the situation.  At least you get to clear your conscience with yourself.  What about the fear of leaving someone feeling hurt, abandoned, betrayed?  If you can’t stay in the same situation without removing the resentment, then your choice to stay is a continued choice to be resentful to others.  Your self-sacrifice, your voluntary imprisonment in that situation, will continue to generate anger and resentment and renders both of you joyless.

Things rarely improve on their own under these circumstances.  By staying in the situation, you will become stagnant or things will get worse.  When you cut your ties with that situation and break an unhealthy pattern of allowing yourself to be abused, you trust that in time things will move in your favour.  When you do the right thing by you, your direction will be revealed to you.  I have witnessed many times how giving up something brings in something better which we never imagined before.  This is the gift when we open up to trust.