Identifying Barriers to Your Divatude
Welcome to Day 26 of our 31 Days of Embracing Your Divatude Challenge! Today’s challenge focuses identifying barriers and stumbling blocks that may keep you from fully embracing your divatude.
If you are new to the challenge, you can catch up here.
Briefly, the month of May is dedicated to focusing on our Divatude – being driven, inspiring, victorious and called to action in our personal and professional lives. As women, different aspects of divatude impact our daily walk at all times. Our focus with this challenge is taking the time to reflect on our daily attitudes and actions and ensuring we are focusing on what will lift us and others around us up.
Embracing your Divatude starts within. It starts with you making a conscious decision to focus your time, thoughts, and actions on being a better person for the benefit of those you impact throughout your daily walk. Your personal growth and self-development is arguably one of the most important thing you can do with your time. In many ways all your actions are geared towards self-improvement. Everything you do, you should do with a positive intent. This, however is mostly unconscious and for the majority of people it’s a case of pursuing things and stuff with the (all to common) assumption that when they get enough stuff they will be happy.
You don’t have to search too far to find just how wrong this theory really is. Every day we read about extremely successful people who end up in rehab or worse. At no point in our lives can we say, “Hey I think I’m pretty awesome. I will just take the next year or so off from focusing on bettering myself.”
The key to a lifetime of happiness lies in personal growth. Real and lasting fulfillment in life comes from consistently improving the quality of your life. Life is dynamic and it has to keep moving. Like in nature, everything that does not grow, dies! You will either grow or die, and although you probably won’t die a physical death, you most certainly will suffer a psychological death. Depression is but one example of the effects of failing to grow as a person. If you are not growing you will feel like you are dying.
Every day life hands us opportunities to grow. They are mostly disguised as problems and unfortunately most people curse them instead of seeing the wonderful opportunities that they present.
There are certain personal growth barriers that prevent us from actively progressing in any area of our life:
Barrier #1: Procrastination
Procrastination is the irrational delay of tasks, especially important ones. On a conscious level you might want a specific result and you know what course of action to take, but still you remain immobilized. The failure to act is what keeps you where you are. It is likely that what you are procrastinating about is what you MUST do as this will help you grow in your ability to take action and just do it. Keep in mind that you only procrastinate about tasks that you value and at some level you know you will benefit from it.
Barrier #2: Indecision
Every single action is preceded by a decision. The ancestor to every action is a decision and the failure to act can be traced back to the failure to make decisions. The ironic thing is that not making a decision is a decision – isn’t it? Indecision is like a disease that you have to eradicate from your life. Indecision is simply the result of a fear of failure and by not making a decision you can’t fail right? Realize that nothing in the future has happened yet and fearing the worse possible outcome will almost certainly keep you from making the decision. If you don’t make the decisions you won’t take the actions and you will remain immobilized.
Barrier #3: Comfort Zones
Comfort zones are all those things that you are too familiar with and often to the point where you don’t even attempt anything else. Inside your comfort zones everything is known and you have this sense of certainty that you can comfortably deal with anything that comes your way. You’ve done it before and you feel at ease with it. Stepping outside your comfort zones challenge your beliefs and it challenges your perceptions. Stepping outside your comfort zones however, challenges you to grow as a person you have to grow to get comfortable outside your old comfort zone. Most of your limitations are self-imposed and controlled by what you belief you can or cannot do, what you like or dislike, what you think is right or wrong. You have to keep stretching your self physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually to avoid standing still and remaining imprisoned by your comfort zones. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said Man’s mind, once stretched to new idea never goes back to it’s original dimensions.
All barriers are only that they are barriers. If you have ever traveled to another country by car, you may have noticed that the vehicle barriers at the border check points are very flimsy. They can hardly stop a bicycle, yet they stop big sixteen wheelers. The barrier is more psychological than actual. So are the barriers to your personal growth. They can stop you, but they can’t keep you unless you allow them to. Simply acknowledge them and then move on. Personal growth is a choice and its an active process. To ensure a happy and fulfilled life that is filled with joy and appreciation you have to consistently grow and expand yourself.
Your challenge today is to determine if any of the personal barriers are stopping you. If so, the first step is acknowledging the barrier exists and then actively taking the steps to remove it or them.