I noticed something lately that I'm sure keeps a lot of people from being as successful as they want to be in their challenge. When I started this challenge a few days ago, I took the usual beginning steps of defining my goals, mapping out my plan, and getting myself excited about what I expect to accomplish. But as excited as I am it felt like something wasn't quite right. After a little bit of thought it hit me that underneath it all was a belief that was holding me back...
It hit me that if you don't truly believe that you will succeed, that you just won't have the power and the passion you need. I know this ought to be painfully obvious but how many times have I seen people so gung ho when they start their challenge, making sure to cover all of the details, but weeks later, their passion wanes and they become discouraged, wondering what went wrong... But when you think about it, it's pretty simple. If you don't truly believe that you're going to be able to achieve your goals then you're simply not going to have that much of a commitment to staying the course when things get tough. Your mind will make a simple assessment - "Why struggle through the pain if you're not going to drop all the weight anyway?" Or perhaps previous setbacks are weighing on you... "Why go through all this stress when I'm probably going to gain it all back anyway like I did before?" You then tend to lower your expectations to match your lack of confidence. And there's simply no passion in coming up short of what you truly wanted. Before you know it you're dumping the whole thing telling yourself it's better just start over. But yet, that underlying and disempowering belief that shot you down this time is waiting in the wings to shoot you down again...
The main point I'm trying to make is to make sure that the beliefs related to your challenge are where they need to be for you to succeed. In a nutshell, if you truly don't believe you will succeed then, of course, you won't. I know this all sounds so obvious but then again it's easy to miss. Especially since many of our beliefs about ourselves and life in general were installed a long time ago and perhaps we have never even questioned whether they were serving us well or holding us back...
Okay now, what do you say we go for it?! Sounds like a deal to me!