Have you ever been in a place where you are trying and trying to chase your dreams, to stick to the plan, but you just don’t seem to be making headway? It’s lik...
Have you ever been in a place where you are trying and trying to chase your dreams, to stick to the plan, but you just don’t seem to be making headway? It’s like trying to swim back to shore against the current. You swim and swim, but when you lift your head, you’re no closer than when you last looked. An invisible force stops your from making any headway. It’s dispiriting, frightening even, and you end up questioning whether you’ll ever make it. Our contention is that the invisible force keeping us from reaching shore is very often our environment and so – wherever we are in our lives – we should pay attention to it and see what needs to change.
One of the biggest challenges we face is the distraction and influence of technology. We know. We know. Everyone says it.
But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and look around, everyone is buried in tech. All the time.
Obviously, the socials can be a problem. You get home from work, fully intending to hit the gym and feel the pump, but an hour later, you’re half changed and still doom scrolling. The gym session doesn’t happen. Neither does the next. Or you have Saturday morning free for a change, and there’s a good opportunity to spend that quality time with the family, but then half the morning disappears behind a phone screen. Or you sit down to work on the business you’re getting off the ground, and, well, you know the rest…
But it’s not only social media consuming on form of content or another that gets us. AI has become ubiquitous, but at what cost? Studies are starting to come out that show that using AI dulls our minds significantly and that the advice it gives is largely dependent on the order of the potential options you give it.
Tech is all around us, all the time. It is our environment, yet we’re seldom mindful about our interactions with it. We just go with the flow.
Maybe it’s time to start controlling the tech instead of it possessing us.
Closely linked with that are our routines. We can have the best intentions in the world and all the motivation we need, and have our journey completely kiboshed by a bad routine. Of course, tech can be part of this. An hour on the phone when you wake up is probably holding you back, for example. But there are all sorts of other things that we can put into our routine that, ultimately, holds us back.
In the coming weeks, we’re going to revisit the topic of building a positive routine, so we’re not going to explore it too much here, but we do want to mention one thing: sleep.
It’s probably not possible for us to get the optimal amount of sleep. Getting eight hours seems like a fantasy, in all honesty. However, we’ve all been at that place where we wake up feeling like someone has been beating you with a pole and wishing we had another hour to sleep.
Perhaps that can be arranged, though. It’s quite possible that we have things in our daily routines that can be changed to give us the extra bit of sleep we need, and sleep that’s a bit better as well.
Really, the importance of sleep cannot be understated. Have you ever noticed that you get a nasty pain in your head after several days of having very little sleep? That’s literally a buildup of toxins in your brain that’s causing the hurt. One of the things our body does while we sleep is flush the toxins out our brains. If you don’t get enough sleep, the toxins build up.
It’s no wonder that when you a good amount of high-quality sleep, you wake up ready to conquer, ready to make that presentation, ready to run that PB.
Of course, if we’re thinking about things in our environment that affects our proactivity and chances of success, we have to think about habits and our social circles as well.
A bad habit can be costly, and they’re easy to form, but hard to break. You probably have a bad habit that’s holding we back. Pretty much all of us do but don’t realise it, or we do, but don’t really want to kick it or don’t know how to. However, one of the keys to reaching our goals is finding those bad habits and ruthlessly eliminating them.
And that’s where some good friends will help. We’re not going to get into how to handle friends that are holding you back (though you probably want to think about it), but we will suggest that you spend more and more time with the people who make you batter and who are better than you. There’s something pretty inspiring about being around other people who are genuinely straining to reach their goals as well. Spend time with people like that and you’ll find yourself picking up some of their good characteristics.
And the more you spend time with people like that, the better they will get to know you, and the more likely they will be to call you out on your bad habits. Sometimes, though, you’ll need to take a leap of faith and ask for some real hard truths, trusting that they are looking for your good.
And that’s why you cannot put a price on a good and strong social circle. You can look for them, though, and you can invest in their lives too.
We tend to be a bit blind to our personal environment and it it’s surprisingly easy to overlook things in our environment that are holding us back. It’s a bit like that old analogy of the fish not knowing that it swims in water because that’s the “air” it breathes. But this is why we need to trey and take the time to take stock from time to time – get some outside help, even – so that we can remove the invisible forces stopping us from reaching the shore. We need to pay attention to our environment.
Keep dreaming. Keep running.
