How you might be distracting yourself from your million dollar life
Scrolling and shopping may be how you delay making changes
It’s hard to listen to a powerful, inspirational, message from Tony Robbins without feeling like you can do absolutely anything. It stirs up your spirit and before you know it, you want to speak your mind, own your mistakes, and chart a clear plan for a million dollar life.
Who could blame you? The fact of the matter is, we all want to do better, do the thing we love, and stop groveling to anyone and anything that seeks to control us. It’s in our nature to “do”. Yet, within a few hours or days of the inspired game plan, we start to feel our focused energy wane.
Why is it that every negative thought we have about ourselves is forever etched into our brain, but a fire hose of inspired messages and goals quickly fade allowing those old familiar habits to easily fill in the gaps? Why do we love to hang on to the very things that limit our ability to change our lives?
Fear.
The fear of change is more common than you’d think. If you’re thinking that’s not something you need to worry about, it might be time to check yourself. You could be masterfully filling your day with fearful avoidance without realizing it.
The question is, why? What are you afraid of? Again, this may take some digging, but it’s worth doing the work to figure it out, or you’ll just keep doing things to keep yourself comfortably stuck.
Here are some clever ways you may be avoiding making changes
Revisiting unfinished business
Right in the throes of your new project, you decide to pump the brakes and go back into organizing your emails into folders, or to revisit the garage cleaning project you started last spring. Whatever the lingering item is, it’s been sitting there undone this long, so you don’t need to stop what you’re doing to attack it.
Recognize that you're simply avoiding doing something new. Maybe it’s because the idea of it comes with a lot of other work, or maybe you just feel comfy where you are, either way, the fact that you are stopping your work to go back to an old item on your to-do list, is a sign you’re avoiding your potential new success.
Getting back to working on yourself
Suddenly you remembered that this is the month you were going to make exercise a priority and drop that last ten pounds. Well, now that you have bubbled that back up to the surface, you don’t have time to dedicate to your new project because this prior goal should take priority.
Once you lose that weight and can check that off your list, you’ll be in a much better state of mind and feel so empowered to get back to the business at hand. You convince yourself that self care should be your top priority, and you can't work on anything else until that is addressed.
What’s in my cart?
If you stop dead in your tracks when working on your new business idea or your new you plan to see what’s in your Amazon cart, something’s up. Opening up a tab on your laptop to look into the latest deals or what you can get a discount code for, is you deflecting again. You don’t need to wrap up your shopping or set up your annual teeth whitening right now. You’re just shifting the uncomfortable idea of success and change into mindless shopping and busy work.
So now what? You’ve identified these and other similar avoidance mastery steps. Is it hopeless?
Definitely not
Admitting it is the first step. The second step is calling bullshit on yourself every time you sell yourself and your future short by doing these avoidance tactics.
Figure out what is at the root of your fear of change by talking to someone, or even by meditating and journaling your feelings around new ideas. Something is making it undesirable for you, and you need to get to the bottom of it.
Then, get organized. This is very key in creating new habits which will lead to you accomplishing the amazing goals you are trying to set for yourself.
Block out time each week for your new work. Be specific and stick to it.
Set some small, short term goals that are easily attainable to keep yourself in positive momentum
Have an accountability resource. Pick a person that will keep you on track so you don’t veer off into those distractions again
Once you can call your avoidance tactics out, you’ll stop using them as filler for your fear. It will take some time, and they may even get replaced with other simple time suckers, but hopefully next time you’ll know enough to identify the scam.
If you want something better for yourself, or just something different, know it’s going to take a little time, and likely some change on your part. It’s not always easy, especially when the here and now isn’t necessarily terrible.
But going after that million dollar life might be more fun.
🎉P.S. — Wanna know how to get on track with a daily self-care practice in midlife?
Grab my Self-Care Checklist and Daily Planner to get started today!