Especially when you are a driven person, you can get caught up in believing that your success doesn’t match your expectation. You thought you’d be more successful by now or further in your career or making more money. You work harder because of this belief, but it also can reinforce a belief that you’ve fallen short in some way. To break your mind out of this cycle, try checking your rearview mirror. You’ve already broken barriers, succeeded in ways you hadn’t imagined and been unapologetically fierce to get to where you are. Here’s how to use that hindsight to validate:
Grieve to Achieve
Sometimes you need to be reminded that you can soldier on after something has happened that made you believe that you can’t. It is ok to take a moment and grieve. What’s creating that feeling is coming from a place of loss. Things didn’t work out the way you planned. You didn’t achieve what you expected or the goal you had set for yourself. It’s ok to take a moment and process that feeling of loss. It’s actually really important to process that feeling so that it doesn’t catch up to you later or stay bottled up inside. Once you have, pick up and carry on.
When In Doubt, List It Out
You probably are seeing a bit of a trend here as I love some lists! Physically writing down where you have succeeded in the past will give you a good idea of your strengths and successes. It brings a level of clarity and shows patterns of overcoming obstacles that you felt were insurmountable at the time. You use facts to convince yourself that you can keep knocking down barriers and moving forward.
Find Your Favorite Feedback
We all have feedback that we’ve gotten either professionally or personally that stopped us in our tracks. The feedback that made us think “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong person, you’re talking about ME? That person sounds amazing…” Write that feedback down.
I recently heard some secondhand feedback that “If Jess wants it, she will go out and get it.” I’d like to think that I’m an unstoppable force that will unapologetically go after my dreams, but there’s times that I doubt myself. I was so surprised to hear that someone else thought that I could and would achieve. I felt like I could run through a brick wall after that. Find that feedback that makes you feel like a superhero.
Make it a background on your phone, write it on a sticky note and put it on your laptop so that you are reminded that you have been amazing to someone and that you have the power to be amazing again.
—
You’ve gotten this far and thrived. Before you lose faith or believe that whatever you are facing is insurmountable, remember that you have felt like there was an impossible task before you and, based on history, you’ve prevailed. When you check your rearview mirror, you remind yourself that you have succeeded and can repeat the process no matter what you face.