Obstacles to Success

It can come as quite a shock to learn that, consciously or subconsciously, you may be sabotaging your own efforts at achieving success. The suggestion may indeed sound completely counter-intuitive - after all, we all want success don't we?

OK, so let's look at the seven most common obstacles to success and find out what we can do about each of them.

1. No Clear Direction

The first obstacle to achieving outstanding success is a lack of Clear Direction. Without taking consistent, focussed action that's linked to a clear vision, sense of what is important and what we wish to accomplish, we are guaranteed get absolutely nowhere. So the importance of arriving at a sense of what is important to you and what you are here on the planet to achieve simply cannot be overstated.

To overcome this obstacle, you need to develop a strong sense of Life-Purpose, Vision and Mission before you even begin to contemplate your goals. You might call it: being concerned with 'doing the right things, before doing things right'. This is a vital key ingredient of success that is often completely missing from discussions on goal-setting; and why, for many people, they never seem to really manage to achieve the deep satisfaction and fulfilment in life that they are seeking.

2. Inability to Control Thinking

If success were easy, everybody would be doing it - right? When we have embarked on a course of action that requires us to solve problems in order to reach our goals, we need to take proper control of our ability to think. Once we have our major objective in mind, we can begin to engage in the kind of sustained thinking that produces the inspiration for our course of action provided we can train our mind to produce the kind of insights we need to succeed.

Until comparatively recently, training the mind to overcome this obstacle could take years of practice in order to become reasonably proficient in mental disciplines that stimulate creativity such as creative visualisation, contemplation and meditation. With recent developments in Binaural Beat technology, it has become possible to induce highly creative brain activity simply by listening to specially prepared music.

3. No Blueprint for Success

To achieve exceptional success, we need to employ the very same success strategies that have been proven to be correct, time and again, by the most successful people. By adopting what is known to work already, we can significantly reduce our own learning time - this principle is known as 'modelling', of course. But many people just do not know how to gain access to the strategies of the most successful people - this represents a third obstacle to success for many people.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this difficulty because we can have access to the very same success philosophy used by some of the most successful people ever to have lived. And, by the application of the law of cause and effect, we can produce the same results too, because like causes always produce like effects. The way to overcome this obstacle, therefore, is to adopt the success strategies of those who are already successful.

4. Engaging in Negative Behaviour

It is a fact of human nature that many people engage in negative, counter-productive and even destructive behaviour. We generally know own negative behaviours are; and may have even been struggling with dealing with them for years. Some of the most common negative behaviour includes: over-eating, smoking and lack of focus. Overcoming these negative behaviours represent a fourth obstacle to achieving success.

In Napoleon Hill's classic book, Think and Grow Rich, one of his thirteen success principles involves making use of the power of auto-suggestion or, in other words, self-hypnosis. It's true that this is a very powerful success technique and it can be used for many things including dealing permanently with those negative behaviours.

5. Lack of Understanding

Sadly, some people seem to think that all you need do is think in order to attract success. Although some people do seem to propose this approach, it is plainly incorrect as anyone who has never managed to make the connection between thought and action can attest. So a lack of understanding - particularly of the law of attraction - represents the fifth obstacle to success.

There are certain universal laws that operate unerringly to bring success or, indeed, failure to us. In particular, the law of attraction has gained a lot of attention in recent years since the success of the movie The Secret, and rightly so: however, to be able to make proper use of universal law, we need first to understand it. Developing this understanding is absolutely fundamental to overcome this obstacle and avoid the common pitfall mentioned above.

6. Lack of Motivation

Successful people are truly motivated: they are motivated to do 'whatever it takes' in order to achieve their goals. They not only have the desire, they also have the basic motivation that activates their behaviour and gives it direction. Sometimes, following through with the right behaviour is just plain hard: we just don't feel like doing 'whatever it takes'. The inability to rise above such feelings represents a sixth obstacle.

Successful people are intrinsically motivated; that is, they tend to attribute success to their own ability to impact their reality - this is sometimes referred to as an 'internal locus of control'. To become really successful, we too must develop our own intrinsic motivation - and that process essentially begins with working on our own basic thinking.

7. Lack of Self-Belief

If you have ever found yourself holding back on something you really wanted to do, you are familiar with self-limitation - we all have some self-limiting beliefs. Limitations can serve us in some ways, but they also constrain us. Take a moment to think about your own perceived limitations. What do you believe you can't do yet? Lack of belief in your ability to achieve your goals is the seventh obstacle.

As it turns out, our beliefs are not set in stone - they can certainly be changed. It is indeed possible for us to get rid of disempowering beliefs and change them for empowering ones. Just think what might happen in your life if you could ditch the very beliefs that are holding you back right now. Of course, you need to identify them and then work on eradicating them, but you can do it by learning to develop a positive attitude and an empowering belief system.

So, to summarise: to achieve real success in life, you must develop your vision, stimulate your creativity, make use of proven strategies, eliminate negative behaviour and improve your understanding, motivation and belief.

Hope you will make use of these ideas.

Cheers

Will