What’s Really Holding You Back From Success?

Chances are you’re not really satisfied with your level of earning, the amount of time you have to work to earn a decent living, or how fast your business is growing. Something is holding you back from reaching the success you deserve.

You probably have blamed a lot of external factors in holding you back: you lost your job last year and you’ve had to completely start over with a new and unfamiliar field you are still learning; you have to stay home part of the day with the kids; you haven’t got enough savings or income to put much cash into a new business; you’ve never had any business training; your family thinks you’re crazy for starting your own business. The list of outside excuses for what is holding you back is endless.

The best advice I can give you is to forget all those other excuses and look inside yourself. The fact is you are the biggest obstacle to your own success.

First, clarify your thinking. Fuzzy thinking ruins more start-up businesses than anything else. By fuzzy thinking, I mean, being unclear about your goals and what it will take to reach them. You must know what you really want from your business. You need to have plotted the minimum steps and effort that it will take to get there. You need to have thought in terms of the fastest and easiest route to reaching your goals. So many people plot the most circuitous route, not the fastest and most direct! They think they need to know and experience it all before they can have any of it. That’s a recipe for failure right there.

When you look at what you really want, think objectively, not emotionally. Think like a consultant looking at you from outside. Think like the doctor trying to diagnose a pain you have been experiencing. That will help you to plot the simplest and fastest route to what you want in your business and your life and it will take some of your emotional, internal excuses out of the mix.

Don’t be afraid to examine and acknowledge the problem behaviors and habits that you have that are probably holding you back. Do you spend half your day on Facebook or email rather than working on top priority, money-making tasks first? Do you decide to watch TV at night rather than participating in a local real estate investment meeting or a webinar on a process that is on your goal list to learn? Do you fritter away money on advanced tactics and strategies when you really haven’t learned the basics yet?

Once you are ready to take an honest look at yourself and your behaviors list the top five things that may be holding back your business life. List them in order of what would give you the most impact for the least amount of effort, and begin by changing that top negative behavior. Think in terms of whether you need to eliminate it, change it, delegate it, or concentrate more of your own efforts on it. Then get to work making that change. Over time, look at each of these business-inhibiting behaviors and make positive changes in each one.

Take these steps to start with examining yourself and I think you will find this will be dramatically better for you and your business than last year.