This one's an inner belief shift to help you #healworklife. If you were raised with the belief that the slightest roadblock to a goal should be avoided at all costs, you may have mentally encoded challenges in your endeavors as something negative and anxiety-making. Even the word "challenge" might be charged for you with a 'pre-failure' feeling that makes your stomach clench up in knots.
Let's toss all that blocking thought out the window! It's not at all reality -- it's all in how you frame it.
Do you frame challenge as threatening or exciting?
By challenge, I mean anything you face as you walk your goal: any barrier, obstacle, problem, fear of failure, actual failure, time of struggle, frustration, anything that feels like fiery coals blocking your way.
How you regard these will make or break the scale and complexity of projects you engage with, as well as just your everyday experience of work life and the ongoing endeavors you may engage with as an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or high performer. Your willingness to tackle high-level challenge is often based on how you encoded "challenge" as representing your potential for success.
If you're hesitant around challenge, you may start off well, then immediately give your project up when one or two roadblocks pop up. Or when others look on you with disapproval or 'disappointment' (often a tactic of theirs, if they know you'll give up). "You're not trying THAT again, are you?"
If you're confident and matter-of-fact with challenge, you learn to frame bumps, roadblocks as exciting experiential learning, as something to relish -- as calls to inspired action. They are the Everests to climb because they are there.
The more you engage with them, the more you hone your ability to take on far more complex projects, with higher risk, and also, higher levels of potential reward.
Four models of limiting challenge beliefs
So explore your inner landscape on the topic of challenge, engagement, and blockage. Do a check-in with the word "challenge" and the reaction it creates in you. Say to yourself, "I'm likely to encounter a lot of challenges on the road to my goal." Explore how that resonates with you. All answers are OK, they are just the starting points of learning to engage more deeply with challenge. Do you feel anxious? Threatened? That you should quit while you're ahead? That "everyone" will think you're a failure?
Here are four limiting beliefs as containers to explore. Did your family, peers, even your current life partner or work culture, model or even tell you any of the limiting beliefs above? How are these holding you back in professional life now?
What would you be tackling right now with relish, if not for these ideas?
Limiting belief: "Challenge is abnormal and means failure." This belief holds that perfection is normal and reflects your potential for success. That the "perfect" person glides smoothly through the entire project, from first minutes of inception, to champagne-toasting success. That only failures encounter challenges. DEFUSE THIS: Realize that challenges are natural as you engage with higher levels of complexity, wise risk, and the advancement of a strategic initiative.
Limiting belief: "Challenge is the universe telling you to give up." This false belief holds that a perfect, smooth path means you're destined to have it. That only a smooth road indicates you are "destined" to have it, while the slightest roadblock is "proof" that the universe is telling you to give up. DEFUSE THIS: Affirm that "challenge is showing me I'm going in the right direction." If you weren't heading into new and fruitful unknown territory, you wouldn't ever be meeting the challenges you're facing.
Limiting belief: "Persistence means you're a fool." This belief maintains that if you're not already good at it on the first try, you will never be good at it at all, so stop trying. It also maintains that the more you try, the more you show what a fool you are for not getting the give-up memo. Oh, and, P.S.: You're embarrassing us all. DEFUSE THIS: Realizing that it takes time, tries, falls and failed attempts to build the library of experiences that lead to mastery. Persist with openness and curiosity -- what did you learn this time? What will you try anew with your new knowledge?
Limiting belief: "Challenges represent a threat to your success." This belief maintains you should dive, duck, avoid, hide, and run away from potential challenges, as they are a threat to your reputation, skill, ego, and outward success. DEFUSE THIS: If you fail at doing something AMAZING, you're way farther ahead than those who never even try because they might have a hair out of place if they do. YOU are the one who defines your success -- to yourself, and to others.
Learn to love challenge!
The sadness of those limiting beliefs is that they make you shy away from projects you can really sink your teeth into. They're built around the idea that "maintaining the image of a perfect person" is more important than really engaging with a rewarding project and the knotty but rewarding problems it presents to be solved. They encode the problems themselves as "proof to give up" rather than "things that are just begging to be tackled."
If you've danced around listening to those limits all your life, now's the time to change.
Here's how:
Develop belief in your challenge skills. Much challenge-as-failure response comes from doubting your ability to succeed if handed a problem. So begin to cultivate, and believe in, your own problem-solving skills. Realize you can have a firm faith in your ability to rise to the occasion and resolve what needs to be resolved. Reflect on all the times in your career you've already done so.
Disregard others who want to jump on your slightest challenge as "proof of failure". You may still have these people in your life. Learn to disregard them.
Realize that all top professionals have faced significant challenges and built their experience level in handling challenge confidently. Far from that old image of gliding gracefully to the top, professionals who're up there in the game have had significant, sometimes even unbelievable, challenges, failures, and recoveries. So you're in good company when you tackle the tough stuff on the way to your visionary goal.
Deliberately encode challenges as exciting! Your mind moves away from pain and toward pleasure, so start seeing challenges as high-level rewards or processes that really get your engagement going in the solving of them.
Persist until you solve it. Keep cracking away at it until you create a solution. Reward your persistence with appreciation of your ability to stick with it. If you wish, set a wise stop loss point, at which you will turn yourself into other endeavors -- your own inner wisdom will tell you when you're really supposed to go on, or whether another route will carry you across the line.
Stay joyful. Find the joyfulness of solving challenges. It's a good feeling!
When you can encode a challenge as invitation to action, as a call to tackle whatever it is with your best skills, you've got a strong foundation for achievement that takes you farther in work and life.
What challenges will you now face with eagerness today as you #healworklife?
Keep Growing,
© Katherine R. Lieber & TitaniumBlue LLC
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