Today, we’re going to talk about the fact someone’s holding you back from getting all the success that you want and how to stop that from happening. I was born in London and over time, ended up moving to America. But the story of how I ended up moving to America was because I had not just one person holding me back, but a whole bunch of people.
In fact, millions of people were holding me back from the success that I wanted in life. Not in the way you think, you see English culture has a very stoic attitude. If you tell someone you’re going to do something, they’ll often tell you all the reasons why it’s going to fail and all the reasons it’s not going to succeed.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the reasons why I didn’t go ahead and try and build a business when I was younger was simply because I didn’t believe I could do it. I was surrounded by people that kept telling me I can’t do it. If you are in a position in life where you’re unhappy with the results you’re getting, or if your business isn’t growing the way you want it to. Or maybe you haven’t started your business yet, and you’re not sure what to do. Half the reason could be because you’ve got people in your life telling you all the reasons why it’s going to fail.
You Need To Understand Willpower
To understand how this is messing you up you need to understand something about willpower. You see every single day when you wake up, you wake up with an amount of willpower and every decision that you make during the day saps an amount of that willpower. If you remember back to Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or even Bill Gates, you’ll realize that most of these people wear the same outfit over and over again. They don’t tend to change their clothes and that’s because they understand this concept of willpower.
The more decisions you make during the day, the harder it gets to make decisions as the day goes on. In fact, towards the end of the day, you’re so burnt out on decision-making that all you can do is collapse and sit in front of the television or play video games or read a book, and then pass out.
You must control the decisions you make earlier on in the day. The fewer decisions you have to make before you leave your house and start working on a business or get to work, the more successful you’re going to be in life.
Control The Amount of Decisions You Have To Make
It was very difficult for me to be successful in the UK because every time I tried to do something, I had people tell me that it wouldn’t work. That negativity sits in your mind and holds you back. Freud identified that our brain essentially has the ID, the Ego, and the Superego that are constantly in conflict with each other.
One of them is the voice of the people around you telling you what you can and cannot do and if you’re constantly hearing negative voices holding you back, then you are going to be fearful about trying something new.
How many pushups can you do…?
Every time you try and do it, all you can hear is all the potential failure and it makes you doubt yourself. It makes it hard for you to achieve it. If you ever want to see this in real life, sit down and start trying to do some pushups that you know you can do, and get one of your friends to tell you that it’s not going to work and that your arms are tired, that you might as well just rest, and they’ll be the hardest pushups you have ever had to do. It’s like counter motivation.
This de-motivating energy will sap all your strength and you find you may not even do 10 pushups. Ultimately, I realized if I wanted to be successful, I had to surround myself with people that told me, you can go out there and you can do it.
I had to alter the people that I hung out with. It’s not that I wanted to cut my friends out of my life, I didn’t. But I needed to spend less time around people telling me that I couldn’t do something and more time around people that told me I could. People who wanted me to achieve and would say, “Yeah, you go out there, you give it a go, you try it!”
I went to America
The first time I came to America, I was invited to give a talk on a stage in Hollywood. To talk about my experience as being one of the best dating coaches in the world. I remember my business wasn’t successful at the time and so it was a bit of a gamble. But I decided to go ahead and do it and I was so impressed by the number of people that were telling me, congratulations and you can do this, you can make it happen.
It was a stark contrast to the cold reality of England, where people were telling me that I was going to fail and I wasn’t going to get the results that I wanted. I knew that I had to surround myself with these people if I wanted to be successful. I decided to make that move out to America to change it, but in your life, it may not be as easy as simply changing countries.
To get the success that you want, to build that business you want, or to remove that negativity in your life there is a really simple way you can do it. By making sure you spend more time with people that encourage you and less time with people that hold you back.
Find out what people in your life say about your success
You should talk to people in your life about this concept. Take your closest friends out to coffee and tell them that you need to be surrounded and appreciate being surrounded by people that say you can do something, and when someone gives you the negative or the potential failures there, it makes me not want to go for it.
In order to get the success that you want, you need to be surrounded by people that are willing to push you. You’ll be shocked at how often your friends and family will be willing to give you these pushes to help you get that success or take that business where you want it to be. Now, anyone you know who’s a naysayer is going to be comfortable telling you, I can’t do that, I need to tell you the truth.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be friends with those people, but you can definitely reduce the amount of time you spend with them. Don’t tell them about any of the new projects you’re doing. That way you can still hang out and spend time with them, but they can’t hold you back or give you these feelings of negative energy that stop you from trying something new, because they literally don’t know about it.
Control where you put your energy with people
As long as you focus on controlling the energy that you put out there and spend with those people, then you’re going to have a chance to be successful because the only people that ever hear about your new projects are people that are going to be encouraging. The people that you know are typical naysayers, you still get to hang out with them, but they don’t know about the projects, so they can’t put them down until they’re successful.
It’s fascinating because once I came to America and my business took off and I started earning over a million dollars a year, all my friends in the UK reached out to me and told me they knew that I was going to be successful. This blew my mind because they were so busy telling me all the different ways that I would fail, I couldn’t understand how they knew I was going to be successful until I realized they were just looking out for me.
There were people that loved me and didn’t want to see me have a failure or take a risk. But if you want to be successful, you need to take a risk. You need to go out there and try it, and that’s why it’s so important to not allow that negative energy to sap your willpower and reduce your ability to make these big leaps and changes you need to do.
If you want to be successful you have to take risks
I’ve done a lot about mindset in the last couple of episodes, but I want to start getting into some of the real elements of a business. So in the very next episode, I’m going to talk to you about the three elements to make any business successful.
As far as I’m concerned, there are only three main areas of a business you need to focus on and understand, and I’m going to be sharing with you my business model that I teach all of my new students. So I’m incredibly excited to be sharing that with you in the next episode.
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