More likely than not, you know the story of Superman. The boy from Krypton who was sent to earth and took on the job of a lowly newspaper reporter at the Daily Planet, hiding behind a pair of thick-framed glasses, while at the same time dashing off to the nearest phone booth to save a plane that was falling out of the sky or help the police catch a bank robber. With all of the strengths that Superman has, there is still one tried-and-true way to bring him down: a radioactive piece of his planet known as kryptonite. What about your kryptonite? What are the weaknesses that have prevented you from being successful in the past and, unless you overcome them, are going to keep preventing you from being successful in the future?
Okay, here’s where you’re going to need to be honest. Don’t worry; no one is going to grade this after you finish it; no one is even going to see it. You can be honest with yourself here because if you can’t be honest with yourself, who can you be honest with? If you really want to improve your life and start achieving your goals, you are going to have to take a good, hard look at some things that you might not be proud of. If you procrastinate doing work on your business because it interferes with the time you spend with friends, be honest about it. If you are terrible at managing your time, be honest about that as well. We’re going to split these weaknesses into three different categories.
Interpersonal Weaknesses
The first type of weakness that we are going to discuss is interpersonal weaknesses. These are weaknesses that come from other people. Most of the time, you will not actually have people stopping you from achieving success; you will just think they are stopping you. In this instance, this is actually a mental block rather than an interpersonal weakness. You can identify when interpersonal weakness is actually a mental one because the person that you think is keeping you from achieving success actually hasn’t said or done anything to prevent you from being successful. An example of this would be someone who is afraid of taking a leap of faith because they don’t want to disappoint their parents when they actually haven’t discussed the matter with their parents and don’t know for sure what their reaction will be at all.
The actual interpersonal weakness, when you really have someone that is impeding you, is more difficult to get past. This usually comes in the form of a spouse. The spouse may not understand what it is that you’re trying to do, they may have fears that you aren’t going to be able to pay your bills; they might even be fearful that you, yourself, are going to change and they aren’t sure where that leaves them. Most of the time, this impediment comes in the form of anger. Rarely does an interpersonal block like this resort in a major life change such as divorce.
Physical Impediments
The next type of weakness that we’re going to talk about is the physical one. Depending on the exact type of physical problem, this can be easy to resolve or can be nearly impossible. If you want to understand how this weakness works, imagine that you want to become a writer. However, you don’t own a computer, don’t have access to Microsoft Word, and you wouldn’t know how to write a book or a professional blog post even if you did. In this situation, two of the physical blocks could be solved with money. You could buy a computer to write on, and you could buy a copy of Microsoft Word.
However, lacking skill is a little bit more difficult to manage. It is actually one of the biggest reasons that people put off starting their business or their road to success for so long because they think they don’t have the appropriate training, schooling, or experience. In the case of our writers, they could develop the skills that they need by watching online tutorials and by starting to put together content pieces. However, that would depend on whether or not they had a computer and access to the software.
Mental Blocks
The last type of weakness that we will talk about is probably the most difficult to face. These are the mental blocks, the things that you believe or think that keep you from achieving your goals. Mental blocks can be difficult to overcome because the first step is to identify them, and this can be extremely hard to do. Facing the facets of your own personality that are self-destructive and are keeping you from being successful is a scary proposition. In fact, figuring out what these mental weaknesses are is probably the hardest step.
Once you’ve figured out what is mentally keeping you from success, then you can start to take steps to remove these mental blocks, one by one. What you will normally find is that these blocks aren’t helpful, and they certainly aren’t logical. You might have a fear of failure that is based on some past event that has no real bearing on your life today, but since that mental block is always there, it seems like it belongs. You have two choices when it comes to these mental blocks: you can cultivate a failure mindset, reinforcing it every single day with negative self-talk – even subconsciously – or you can chip away at those mental blocks every day until you have removed them completely. What is interesting is that both of these take about the same amount of time. You just have to decide if you’re going to shore up your mental blocks or work on removing them.
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