In this article: There is nothing more frustrating in life than being unnecessarily limited.
Being Unnecessarily Limited
There is nothing more frustrating in life than being unnecessarily limited. Regardless of whether you are limited by your own mind-set, other people, or even if it is your resources that seem to hold you back, not being able to achieve what you want to is tough.
Fortunately, there are some things you can do to rise above these difficulties and break through into a whole new chapter of your life.
Rise Above And Breakthrough
Self-Belief
Belief in yourself is something that comes naturally to some people. If you are naturally gifted, then you are probably very familiar with succeeding, at least at the things that you are gifted in. When we look closely enough, all of us can find at least one thing that we are naturally gifted at, but for some people there seems to be no-end to the amount of charisma, charm, and talent that they possess. People like this naturally believe in themselves because they are already used to seeing themselves get results.
What about the people who don’t have a high degree of talent? What about the people who regularly face difficulty when trying to push themselves to do the things that seem to come naturally for others? These people need to develop their self-belief.
Believing in yourself comes when you begin to reflect on your ability to learn. Look back at anything that you have developed in your life, any kind of skill or knowledge that took time to mature. Consider all the times when you walked into a situation knowing nothing at all, and over time, learned to develop the necessary skills to allow you to achieve greater results. Every single one of us began this life not being able to walk, or talk, or even think in the way that we do now. We didn’t know how to cook, how to read, how to write, how to use a smartphone, or computer, the list goes on and on.
When you allow yourself to realize that you have a fundamental capacity to learn, to grow, and develop as a human being you can reawaken your ability to believe in yourself, and when you believe in yourself you can do anything. This is especially true if you spent a long time facing failure but eventually overcame it. Think hard and do some much-needed reflecting upon this.
Discovering Your Strength
When you have reflected deeply on your ability to evolve, you can unlock a greater degree of mental strength. You don’t have to be a Zen master to know how to remain focused on a project, or to have the kind of mindset that doesn’t easily give up. At the same time, you don’t have to be a genius to tap into your ability to be creative or come up with new ways to solve a set of problems. All you have to do is keep yourself focused on whatever is at hand and choose to continue acting like that until you get results.
If you simply refuse to give up, no matter how much opposition you face, no matter how many things attempt to make you turn back, you will unlock the ability to press on in the face of adversity. Being able to push through life’s challenges without losing your resolve is an essential life skill that not enough people are encouraged to develop when they are young.
Imagine yourself walking down a busy city street, the kind of street where it seems like everyone is walking in the same direction. You however, are moving in the opposite direction. It seems like everyone else is whizzing past you at break-neck speed, you are being bumped, pushed, and, abused by people who are telling you turn around and go in the opposite direction.
As long as you refuse to give up, as long as you continue pushing through the crowd not matter how challenging it gets at times, you will succeed in getting where you are going. When you do get to your destination, you will feel the reward of satisfaction, knowing that you made it through the chaos and were able to maintain your strength of mind throughout.
If you give up and allow other people to persuade you, to carry you off in the wrong direction, or even if you lose momentum and decide to give up, you will be taken right back to the starting point. This means you will have to start over the next time you build up the courage to face the crowd head-on.
Managing Your Environment
Another extremely important aspect of breaking through to greater heights and greater achievements is your ability to influence your environment. This means ensuring that your environment, or at least as much of your environment as possible, is conducive towards helping you realize your goals.
When we consider our environment, we are not just referring to the physical place in which we live or spend our time; we are talking about everything in that environment also. As a way of giving you a little insight here into the power of environmental influence, consider the following – if you were to watch 2 movies every night of the week, and all of those movies were of a depressing story, with sad characters, and terrible outcomes for everyone involved, you would begin to feel more depressed as a result. Don’t believe me? Well get ready to have your socks blown off.
In 1979, there was an experiment to see whether or not old people could be encouraged to become young again. You may have heard about it, it was called the Counter Clockwise Experiment and it was featured in a New York Times Cover Article because of the astonishing effects that were observed. Eight men in their 70’s were voluntarily taken from their homes and placed in a new environment to live.
This new environment was designed to look, feel, sound, smell, and taste like it was 1959, 20 years prior. All of them had been medically tested before doing this to gauge their standards of physical and mental health. Another group of eight men, called the control group was asked to only think about their lives in 1959.
Both groups showed a remarkable amount of improvement in every single one of their physical and mental functions, but the group that lived in the ‘time-warped’ environment showed a drastically higher level of increased physical and mental health and ability.
This study revealed that the structure of your internal environment could influence your body and life, internal environment referring to your thoughts. At the same time though, it also revealed that this is even more powerful when your external environment is designed with a certain intention in mind, generating a profound ability to influence and affect your internal state, not just mentally but physically too.
Use this information to rid yourself of anything in your environment that may be influencing you in a negative way. Take control of both your internal and external environments to put yourself on the fast track to radical change.
Positive-Self-Influence
To be able to rise above your current limitations you must begin to influence yourself positively. You can’t rely on other people to do this because most people don’t know how to. They may influence you positively occasionally, giving you advice or encouragement but this is not the kind of positive influence that you can rely on. Most of these people are consumed by negative mindsets and don’t have the wisdom or the strength to effectively manage their internal states.
The kind of positive influence that you need to develop, and master, is the ability to control your own thoughts and emotions so that you only think and feel things that are conducive towards your goals. This takes years of effort to master, but you will begin to feel the effects immediately once you put it into practice.
To learn to master your internal state you need to learn how to hypnotize yourself. This means that you can actively sit and think the kind of things that make you feel good, inspired, motivated, confident, peaceful, and any of the other positive mental attributes that can serve you.
Additionally, as mentioned previously you can also alter your environment to work in the same way. By surrounding yourself with positive people, images, songs, books, movies, documentaries, and even your own positive suggestions, your brain will absorb these and begin to think more along the lines of what you want it to. Naturally, this affects your emotions and helps you to feel more able to rise above your current condition.
Imagine yourself in the experiment that we spoke about earlier, except, instead of making yourself feel younger, you are going to make yourself feel more positive. This alone should give you enough information to figure out what you need to change, what you need to do, and what you need to focus on.
Each person will need to approach their life, lifestyle and environment differently though. Perhaps you have supportive and positive friends, but you listen to too much negative music, or perhaps you watch a lot of inspiring documentaries and movies, but you regularly scroll through Facebook and absorb all the negativity that the people you know spread around.
Pay close attention to your environment and figure out what is no longer serving your desire to rise above your limitations.
Make the necessary changes and watch how it naturally makes you feel better about yourself. Combine this with what you learned earlier about self-belief and discovering your strength and you are well on your way to breaking through into a completely new paradigm in your life.
A Positive Mindset
It’s important to touch upon the aspects and importance of developing a positive mindset in a little more detail, because this is a really high priority if you want to learn to bring about the changes that we have been talking about.
Keep in mind that you can’t just begin to think positively; you need to live and act positively too. Engaging in self-limiting, destructive, oppressive, aggressive, and negative behavior will work against the development of true positivity.
You can’t feel good about yourself if you are acting in any of these ways in your life.
There is a reason that people naturally feel bad about the things they do that hurt themselves or that hurt other people, and no this has nothing to do with being judged by a creator or following some set of laws or morals. It has everything to do with our innate connection to each other and a deep desire to live peacefully and happily in our lives.
People who claim to enjoy being negative, bad, evil or destructive towards each other have become so distant to these innate characteristics that they have forgotten the joy of being able to be completely at peace.
You cannot be at peace if you threaten the lives and safety of others, because you will always be under the threat of their potential revenge.
You cannot be at peace if you are a violent criminal because you know at any moment you could be caught out and sent to live amongst other violent and terrible people too.
At the same time, you cannot live in peace if you have an addiction to some form of behavior that is destructive, because you know that your actions always bring consequences that cause greater conflict to arise in your life.
If you truly want to rise above your limitations and break through to the kind of life that you truly want to live, you are going to have to learn and develop the characteristics of a ‘decent human being’.
- There is a fundamental rule to our existence and it is this – What you give, you get
- What you put out there, comes back around to you
- What you focus on, you develop
If you are giving good, putting out positivity, and focusing on improving your situation for the better, this is what you will get, even if it takes a while to manifest.
If you are doing the opposite of this, then your life will move in the opposite direction.
Balance
Another important aspect of our journey into the world of positive-self-influence is learning to develop the correct kind of balance. This requires that we understand our capacity for the right amount of intensity in our lives, along with the right amount of gentleness.
If you can find the right level of balance between these two, then you will not only be able to press on with the intensity needed to develop yourself, but you will also allow yourself the space for fun and enjoyment.
This much needed balance has to be taken into account in all things. If we are very mental people, meaning we spend a lot of time our thoughts, then we must learn to balance this out with physical activity. Moreover, it works the same way in reverse. If we can organize, our lives like this, then we are better able to develop ourselves holistically.
Although this is something that a lot of people miss when beginning on this journey, everyone figures out the importance of finding the right balance at some point. For those who are unfortunate, usually they will burn themselves out with too much intensity before they realize they need to relax a little.
On the other hand, those who are too relaxed soon learn that they aren’t reaching their true potential and so quickly learn to apply more pressure to themselves to get things moving.
The wisest of us all keep a close eye on this kind of balance from the outset, doing our best to listen carefully to our bodies and minds, to see the signs that let us know we are moving too much in one direction or the other, and then making the changes needed to bring things back into alignment.
Make no mistake, finding the right balance is a constant battle that needs you to be a true general to win.
Sharing
A very powerful force for change in our lives comes in the form of other people. When we can incorporate those who are aligned with our goals in some way, our sphere of influence expands, and we can utilize them to gain deeper insight into the right way to approach a situation.
Incorporating others into our plans also allows them to reap the benefits, greatly improving their quality of life too. When a large team of people work with nothing but positivity in mind, the limits of what those people can achieve are boundless. In order to fully realize this as a way of life, you must learn to incorporate others where you can.
At the same time, incorporating other people into what you are focused on comes with its own unique set of challenges. Sometimes those people can work against you without knowing it, they can be overly critical, passively aggressive, unreliable and even untrustworthy.
Don’t be afraid to give people a chance, and even a second chance, but when people reveal themselves an enemy to your ability to cultivate positivity, you must act in a way that removes them from the situation.
Some people find this hard to do, especially with close friends or family, but it is essential as a life-skill that you learn how to do this effectively, also without over abusing others yourself.
Your inquiry into the nature of balance will help you here. In addition, the more insight you have into this way of life, the better you will be able to handle this kind of situation when it arises, and trust me on this one, it will arise.
Learn to be a leader, and not a dictator. Be prepared to stand by the side of others and offer suggestions and instructions, do not stand in front of them and force them to do things your way.
At the same time though, if people begin to affect you too negatively and they are unable to address this when you reveal it to them, cut them off and allow them to try again with you later.
Innovativeness & Creativity
You can easily get ideas from external sources about to how to change your life, how to rise above negativity and limitation, or how to set about reaching your goals. The difference between a novice and a master though, is that a master of their art doesn’t rely solely on others as their resource for inspiration.
A true master of any art has tapped into an abundant resource for creativity and innovation within his or her own minds. These are the kinds of people who walk on stage with nothing but a microphone and their own thoughts and wow people every time. They have completely and fundamentally understood whatever the issue is at hand, and they can easily, calmly, and professionally answer any-and-all questions pertaining to it.
There is a powerful technique of self-hypnosis that can help you to unlock this ability. You must take whatever the issue is that you are facing, whatever the problem is that you have to deal with, and concentrate your thoughts and attention on it.
To do this you need to temporarily remove the distractions in your environment that have been taking your attention. Turn off your phones, computers, and televisions, make sure the kids or parents are out of the house, or perhaps just take yourself to a private location where you can spend an hour or two alone.
Make yourself relax as much as you possibly can, and imagine the problem that you have. Don’t use your regular ‘word-thinking-voice’. That means, don’t use the internal voice in your head that you usually use to think to address this issue.
You need to use your imagination to visualize and hear the situation. Watch your mind put this together like a scene from a movie. Don’t force the outcome, don’t force it to go the way that you think it should, simply watch your mind put the movie together by itself.
Subconsciously, you are already aware of the exact outcome that you want, so there is no reason to try to force it to happen. Allow your mind to do the work for itself, but concentrate yourself in a way that doesn’t allow your thoughts to wander onto things unrelated to this task, like the bills at home, what he said about what she said etc.
Your mind will come up with potential resolutions and outcomes. Some of them will be good, some of them not so much, but play around with the components of your mental landscape and see what different aspects can influence the outcome to achieve the result that you are looking for.
This is a skill that takes a long time to master, but is well worth the while, and something that used by some of the world’s greatest achievers.
For more insight into this, do your own research into Nikola Tesla Mental Exercises, and into Making Mental Machines.
Final Thoughts
We have come a long way from our starting point of being unnecessarily limited, don’t you think? We have gone beyond the realm of our previously held views and entered a new way of thinking about our condition.
The information that we have covered here is extremely powerful. The action part of this equation is by far the most important. You could only choose to act upon one single point made in this report and even that would bring a much greater degree of positivity into your life.
This is what you need. Don’t stop here.
Don’t fall into the trap of becoming a bottomless pit for knowledge. Take your time in learning, and then put it into action.
At times it may feel like you are going a little crazy, and it can bring with it a bit of an identity crises when you realize that you can change so much about yourself and your life.
Indeed, it may even awaken within you an age-old question, one that has plagued the minds of men and women for as long as men and women have had minds.
If all of this is true (and it is)…
If you really are able to rise above your current mental paradigm and breakthrough something completely unknown to you up to this point…
If everything that you have based your understanding of yourself on, can be so radically transformed in the course of a few months of intense study and practice…
Then, who are you really? And, whatever the answer to that is, it leads you straight into another equally important question that’s just as exciting…
What are you really capable of becoming?
