Anyone who has ever focused on wanting more success in life has at one time or another focused on breaking through barriers, such as limiting beliefs, fears, anxieties and comfort zones.
We all have barriers of some kind or another, and most of us have listened to amazing motivational speakers and coaches talk about how they’ve broken through their own barriers. Their personal stories inspire us and leave us feeling motivated and ready to go out and achieve.
Yet, what truly is the mechanism for breaking through barriers? Does anyone really know? Well I surely won’t attempt to fully answer the question in one short blog post, but I do offer an important starting point.
We tend to start by thinking of a goal or set of goals, such as we want to make more money, we want our businesses to be more successful, we want to deepen our relationship with our family, we want to travel more, and so on. Yet, there is an important next step that is often overlooked, and that is intention.
You could say that the intention is to make more money, but making more money is just an outward manifestation of an inward intention. Why do we want to make more money? Is it to travel more, buy a nicer car, bigger house, college fund for the kids, retirement or something else?
Then after focusing on our true intention the really challenging part comes in, how far are we willing to go to attain that goal? What barriers are we willing to move through, what fears are we willing to face, what insecurities, what limiting belief systems are we willing to let go of?
Many times, and I’ve found this to be the case in my own life, outward goals and the energy I have for them are driven by inward fears of not having enough or not being safe in the world. So in order for me to attain those goals I must first face those fears.
So the initial steps to breaking through barriers go like this: we start with a goal, then get clear on the underlying intention, then examine the fears, blocks or barriers, and then we consider how far we are willing to go to break through.
Are you willing to go to any measure? If not, that’s okay, but then don’t beat yourself up when you don’t break through.
These steps will make the difference between breaking through or staying stuck, and speaking as one who stayed stuck for many years, it isn’t fun. Facing the fears and breaking through is exhilarating and rewarding. I invite you to face a fear and break through.
Money comes from value. We need awesome, ethical and positive value propositions deployed these days.
While I think most people have good values, we live in a world where people who can break through barriers while including a majority of stakeholders to turn our values into new ‘betterness’ realities are quite valuable. Many ‘conventional MBA’ thinkers call this kind of quality a ‘soft skill’ and is not as valuable as non-human analytics. Both matter, but leadership is still essentially a human-human interface.
And it all starts with getting our own internal breakthroughs organized and done.