Operating from a place of need versus a place of faith
If you were to look at your life and what’s going on in it, would you be operating from a place of need, doubt, lack, fear and desperation (the Neediness Zone), or operating from a place of faith, fulfilment, success, belief, abundance, love and peace (the Belief Zone)?
We often look at others and compare ourselves incessantly (as we were programmed and conditioned to do throughout our lives). Competition and comparison guide our footsteps, often making us feel small and insignificant. We go through life thinking if somebody could do something beautifully in X amount of time, we should be able to do the same‘; if’ we can’t, why even bother?
When we fail, we believe that we can never show up in the way professionals do. But this is because we forget that professionals became successful only after having put in the work.
Professionals learn to handle the mantle of responsibility that comes with the outward and visible trappings of success.
We look at external signs and forget that a lot of it takes place internally, behind closed doors, inside the mind and comes marked with the early phases of learning, failures, rejections, judgements, trial and error, and experience. They help sift the extraneous from the essence, the superficial from the substance and evolve into something that is finally ready to show, the top rungs of success. We forget that the visible external resources aren’t the only ones that contribute to success or failure.
Let us take an example of building up a business, transitioning from being an employee to a business owner, something some of us may look at doing soon thanks to the global shift in mindsets related to the workplace, careers and work options. Whatever point you are at, I’d like to invite you to reflect upon your operating system and its roots.
Whatever field you may be in, knowing your stuff differs from marketing it and working it into a successful business model. Taking on the responsibilities of operating a business all by yourself means that you have to consider the structure of running a business and becoming a producer, service provider, accountant, marketing manager, planner, secretary etc all in one (unless you have the means of hiring specialised staff). Even then, you have to learn to manage your business and hold your team together, besides your service/product. It means that you have to grow more, into the new role: you are charting for yourself. You have to learn more skill sets, starting from scratch in most cases.
The good news is that you can learn any skill with study, practice and experience.
All this can take some time, perhaps longer than you had projected, and there may be more things to handle than you had envisaged when you first start out. Keeping this in mind, ask yourself if you are working from a place of confidence and Faith, secure in your ability to figure things out as you go along. Are you willing to tweak your plans where required, find solutions, overcome obstacles, learn and move onto the success you truly deserve because you have worked at applying everything you know and shifting your own mindset?
Or, are you beginning to feel the pressure, lack, desperation, need and the downward spiral of negative emotions this entails because you seem to have done a lot, invested a lot of time, money, efforts and resources, but the results seem to still not show through?
Remember, it’s not that you are a failure, lacking external resources that will trigger your success; it’s simply a case of patience and resourcefulness, getting new skills and inputs to handle the situation.
Remember: you can achieve more in faith than in fear.
The Achologist is the official online publication for Achology, the Academy of Modern Applied Psychology for professional practitioners and life coaches.