Some of us have phases in our lives where things just seem to go according to plan – if we ever had a plan to start with, that is!
Even if there wasn’t a plan, things might have just appeared to fall into your lap anyway for a while.
You might have had bags of potential, which you know you fulfilled at one point in your life, only to realise one day that something’s happened and it doesn’t feel as though it’s there anymore. You’re lost, you don’t really understand where it all went and maybe you don’t feel like you anymore.
Or you may have had dreams and ambitions that you never managed to fulfil; or perhaps you just didn’t know what you wanted or had the potential to achieve.
Whichever way it was for you, there are points in most of our lives where we just seem to get stuck – a bit stuck, or very stuck. Suddenly everything’s not quite so good and we can’t understand where it all went wrong; and for some, it probably never seemed to go very well from the start.
It’s so hard when people ask you what you want out of life – who and what you want to be – and you genuinely just don’t know. You feel envious of people who have a clear life-plan and shiny goals and ambitions and you are scared to think about it for yourself.
Maybe you don’t believe that you too could have the life or work that feels both good, and right for you.
Many of us hold ourselves back in some way, mainly because we’ve had experiences that have taught us that it’s not safe to hope a better life in some way; or maybe our unconscious and usually long-held limiting beliefs about ourselves – often “not good enough” or “I don’t deserve it” – have just prevented us from taking what can seem like leaps of faith in the dark.
I believe and have seen that people have immense potential within them, but have, more often than not, stalled, or been held back by their own and others’ judgements of them, which carries their current limiting beliefs into their future with them.
I’ve held myself back, too, at difficult times in my life.