Necessary Endings - Part Two: Limiting Beliefs.

If you hold your finger over a lit candle, it’ll eventually start to get hot and hurt. Hurt = Pain. Pain drives our brains to move and do something. Have you ever been in “emotional pain” and your mind actually gets stuck and you don’t move? I have…many times actually. I shut down and I just want to regress. Essentially, I become helpless. Usually, around this point, I begin to believe the lies that circle in my head.

“I’m not good enough.”

“I won’t ever make it.”

“You are a failure.”

“You can’t depend on anyone to take care of you.”

Man, typing those is hard. When those lies and limiting beliefs play on repeat, when I find myself facing resistance, that’s when I begin internally (and even externally) “shutting down.” My internal map gets off course.

So what should you do when this happens?

Here are three tips. Some I’ve recently learned thanks to my wife, and some from the book, “Necessary Endings.” (NOTE: These are just three…there’s more. But for time…here are my main three.)

• Define Your HARD WHY:

  • Without a hard why, we can easily become distracted with the ups and downs of life. Getting to your hard why helps us to remain focused and on course, even when we take a wrong turn or hit a roadblock.

• Move Forward:

  • Our brains can differentiate between conflict-free aggression and conflict-aggression. Conflict-free aggression, as defined by Dr. Henry Cloud, is “energy that is free to take action, not hampered, so you can function.”

  • I have some pretty gnarly anxiety sometimes. When I try to move forward while experiencing anxiety, I feel like I’m only operating on about 1/4 of my brainpower. There is so much inertia that I can’t make good decisions. I can’t think or feel like I’m supposed to. On the flip side, when we are clear-minded and have conflict-free aggression, we are able to perform functions at a high level. Dr. Cloud gives some examples:

    • To sense what is really going on around you.

    • To think logically.

    • To think abstractly.

    • To exercise good judgment.

    • To concentrate.

    • To see dangers realistically.

    • To see reality.

    • To make decisions.

    • Then, to act on all of the above.

  • Most of the time, when we are not operating clear-headed, it usually stems from our internal belief system. And to take it one level deeper, many of those thoughts rattling around come from our experiences of past failure.

• Defining Failure:

  • Does ending something mean you’ve failed? For many of us, quitting something immediately equates to, “I am a quitter.”

  • “Failing” by our society means we messed up and lost.

  • However, think about it like this: A baseball player doesn’t consider himself a failure if he strikes out. Why? Because his “identity is separate from anyone result.”

  • Emotionally healthy leaders understand they are bigger than any individual outcome.

As leaders, we must get to the point that our self worth does not depend on our work. It is completely separate from each other. Both the “success” we achieve, and the “failures” we experience. I’ve been there. Still there sometimes, actually. In my madness of trying to prove to others (and myself) that I’m not a failure and fight against the lies in my head, I dig a deeper hole and spiral out of control to make an idea or product work. Eventually, we get to a place where we are not able to end what’s not working in a healthy manner. Or as Dr. Cloud puts it, “failing well.” He says, “Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.”

Ending something that is not working. Then choosing something else better. For me, this ties right back into trimming my rosebush. (See Part One about rose bushes here.)

We need to get to the point where we can end something that isn’t working so that we can pursue something else better. This keeps us moving toward our goals. When we stay with something that is not working because of our ego or stubbornness to prove that we are not failures, we will inevitably miss our goals and our hard why. The rosebush becomes a mess.

Quitting something that is not working does not mean you are a quitter or a failure!

I’ll leave you with a question to think about: What limiting beliefs are keeping you from executing a necessary ending in your life?

Grace and Peace,

VM