Tag: Rise above you fears

Our Self-Sabotaging Ways

Self-sabotage is a real thing. To know you are within sight of achieving your goals but self-doubt and your ego trip you up and fear keep you down is the reality for too many among us. 

Self-doubt 

Self-doubt is one of our greatest nemeses. It tells you, you cannot do anything and you cannot achieve anything, that you are limited by your limitations. For whatever reason, we feel compelled to second guess everything we do. In many instances, we may seem to take steps forward but because of self-doubt, we take even more steps backwards that keep us from what we truly want. Debilitating self-doubt means deferred or abandoned dreams which is the tragic reality for too many. Too many who have been buried with their potential, potential, as Myles Munroe said in one of his sermons, robbed the world of great books, great inventions or great ideas that could have led to transforming lives.

The Ego When it is Negative 

Now, this is a tough one. Our ego distorts our impression of ourselves. It can make us see ourselves constantly needing to prove something when all we need to do is stay within the bounds of what we can do at a particular time. So, to prove we can in every way we overextend ourselves and our resources and try to be an overachiever when no one asked us to be. As a matter of fact, no one required this of us, except our ego, which we work hard to appease to the detriment of our possible success. 

No one has the answers to all we need to know in this life. But we can take the time to reset and reevaluate where we are to avoid self-sabotaging our way through life. We have to return to the simple truth, “once we know better, we must do better”. We know what we must do to be true to who we are to avoid self-sabotage. Let us stop with poor thinking, excuses, self-doubt and a ‘woe are me’, mentality when all we need to do, is do what is right. Nothing is wrong with having a healthy view

of yourself, I believe it is necessary. However, we need to come to terms with the truth that we are not always authentic and we need to be more authentic and more intentional about who we are and how we want to be treated by other.

Fear Can Imprison Us

Then there is fear, the biggest nemesis to self-actualisation. We court fear when we doubt everything we do or say. Fear can come from feeling that at any moment people will realise that we are a fraud and we don’t belong. Such thinking ultimately can lead us to do everything except what we need to do to be on our way, to our business. The vicious cycle that fear can produce will have us seeing a light but remaining in the shadows, frustrated with our inability to move when we need to move. We cannot allow fear to have a stronghold on our minds and in our souls. Once it is there, it will never want to leave because it finds fertile ground to thrive. Let us instead do things anyway, even if you cannot utter a word because if you try to you now you will choke. Move even if it takes all your strength because you have to fight against an insane logic that tells you survival rests in being inactive.

It’s hard but we have to constantly fight against our self-sabotaging ways. For if we do not, how can we truly be the best we can be and experience the joy of living in our truth?

The Only Way is Up!

I am sure that at some point you may have felt the burden of your past. You are so burdened that your legs cannot carry the weight of that past and so you buckle under the pressure of it.

You may also feel the weight of real or imagined eyes that accuse and arrest you and say to you that you dare not move on. While it is important to learn the lessons that need learning from your past, one should never dwell there. One should never pitch a tent there or build a bed there, because they feel like giving up.

“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” (John 5:7)

There are many things that will try to hold us back. There was that great opportunity that we missed and can never get back. Or, there is this one person, or thing that will not leave us alone long enough for us to take the step we need to make the move that is required to step into the pool of opportunity waiting for us. There are so many things that have held us back, and we can’t seem to shake them. Maybe it is that we do not have to tools to overcome these obstacles by ourselves and we are still searching, hoping and praying from the right thing that will help us to do so.

“Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” (John 5:8)

The trick is to stop being your own worst enemy. So,before you get too far, from heeding the naysayers who punish you for the wrongs you may have done and the wrongs of everyone else they could not hold accountable, think whether this is the life you are meant to life. In life you can’t continuously keep looking down or you may miss the path you’re suppose to take and bypass the stops you are suppose to make. When we are given the chance to try again, we cannot stay in the same spot and hope for something or someone to tip us into the pool. Like the man at the poolside who had tried to get in for thirty-eight year, you have to get up, take that bed and walk. Now, life will not be smooth sailing and the experience and some of the baggage accumulated over the years will not magically disappear. But you cannot stay along the pool side if you have been given the opportunity to be healed. You cannot harbour years of doubt, fear or recrimination and hope to move forward. All those things that have kept you immobile have to be removed for you to move up.

and he took up his bed and walked (John 5:9)

At some point we have to decide if the fear of failing is stronger than our need to rise, to experience something truly wonderful and real. When we have been stuck for a long time, will we find the strength, given by The Almighty to finally walk into a future that we are meant to experience? Only you can answer that question and heed the command to get up and walk.