If inside you’re a success then the past doesn’t matter. You feel successful and you’ll do the things that progress your life.

If you are anxious, hesitant, and keep putting things off then you’ll keep putting success off too.

You create success in yourself first. Once you live that then success happens in the outside world too.

I know what I’m talking about on this one. I struggled for years thinking ‘this will make me happy’ with each thing in life, but they didn’t. Until I overcame the nagging self-doubt, worry, depression, over-analysing, trouble sleeping, paranoia about what others were thinking, and so on I was never going to stay happy. Now life is much easier.

The facts speak for themselves. Happy people create more success. Success doesn’t as reliably make you happy.

It’s not the car, the job, the relationship, or the house that will keep you happy. They’ll give you a boost for a while, but then how you feel about yourself inside will reassert itself and your happiness level will return to that lower place.

The one thing that can keep you happy is you. Find how to throw off your baggage, whatever is holding you down, anxiety, depression, whatever. Fix these first. Then it’s much easier to become and stay happy and successful.

Focus on the things that will make life easier, happier, and you’ll be more successful too as your mind will have more energy available, and it’ll be looking for opportunity rather than thinking ‘how can I fail?’

Change is easier than you think”

5 minutes on why we self-sabotage and how to break the cycle.

Change is easier than you think!

Often when people talk about anxiety they talk about panic and fear around specific things. The usual obvious components of anxiety I see would include:

Fear of driving on busy or large roads.
Fear of flying
Panic feelings coming up around groups of people (canteen at work, pub, queue in post office or bank, office party, etc.)
Anger, losing your temper.
Stress at work
Obsessional thinking about an issue (relationship, what your boss thinks, taking things too personally)
Taking hours to fall asleep, or poor quality sleep
Unable to give presentations / public speaking
Panic attacks

All these things tend to be what we think of as the obvious parts of Anxiety, but are they the big issues? Are they the ways Anxiety holds us back most?

In about 2000 hours of clinical work, years of training, and over three decades living with anxiety, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re not. The more subtle elements that lie under the obvious are the more damaging. Let me explain:

When I see the above things as part of an anxiety issue, as opposed to where they occur in isolation, there is an underlying feeling of ‘not being good enough’. It’s odd because when we’re anxious, we try to overcompensate so no-one sees our insecurity. We’d deny we’re insecure and often puff ourselves up to look confident, but inside we don’t believe it.

It hits us in ways like not being able to bank a success. We hold on to what goes wrong and forget our successes.

If someone else does a good job we think they’re great, but if we do it there’s a sense of ‘I got away with it’ or there’s a feeling as if we’re waiting to be ‘found out’.

Often huge stress comes with what we have to do. Each step of a task feels like a task in itself. Our to-do list feels like a mountain of stuff we can’t ever get through, and it feels like there is no point in trying.

We feel there is never time, but we spend hours in distraction – playing games, on the internet, watching TV, whatever. We fill our days but never seem to advance our dreams or plans.

Each new task or thing we take on in life can feel as if we just know we can’t succeed and we don’t give it our all.

We see all the ways we can fail and few or none of the ways we can succeed.

These less obvious, but more constant, issues of lack of self-belief – holding back, feeling insecure, etc. change our options and choices every day. They keep us locked into small limited lives where we let our hopes and dreams pass us by.

We beat ourselves up about anything we think may have gone wrong or been a bad choice.

We stay stuck.

That’s the true price of anxiety. It’s not the occasional crisis points, it’s the constant limiting of your life.

I lived that life for over 30 years before I overcame my Anxiety and Depression. It can change.

There is no one way that works for everyone, but I firmly believe there is a way for each of us. You don’t have to know what to do at this point, just notice if you do need a change. Start looking for options. That’s the first step.

Change is easier than you think.

“With myself, the trauma, it’s very difficult to trust again and it’s very difficult to trust your own judgement too,” Jane adds.

It really makes me angry that the culture of accepting domestic violence is so prevalent here. Even the name is a problem. It’s not ‘domestic violence’ that makes it sound different from the reality that it’s ‘violence’ just as plain and simple.

Old pain (trauma) we don’t think about or that we try and bury eats our confidence, makes us prone to worry and stress, and holds us back in ways we usually never realise.

Thankfully the old trauma can be reduced with the right therapy (there are 4 options that have been shown to work reliably across the world – EMDR, Exposure Therapy, Trauma Focused CBT, & Stress Inoculation Therapy, are all A rated for reducing trauma and PTSD). Getting over it is possible, but it should never be needed in the first place if we didn’t have such a problem with allowing violence to be a part of our culture.

We use so many excuses – ‘he’s a good man really, the drink changes him’, It’s between a husband and wife not our business’, ‘I don’t know what to do or say’ and so on. In each case the choice is to do nothing and to allow it continue.

We need to teach our kids better. We need to shine a light on violence when it happens so it can’t continue in secret. We need to speak out and make an issue of the culture that fosters violence.

Violence, hurt, trauma, shame all stay with us and tear up our lives as we shy away from change and stay feeling stuck and trapped in how we feel. It’s a two part equation. No to violence, yes to change.

http://www.rte.ie/news/special-reports/2015/0329/690723-the-lifelong-scars-of-domesic-abuse/

In order to get nothing done you’ve got to fill your day without finishing anything useful. That’s exhausting. Do you have any idea how much Candy Crush Saga you have to play to stay distracted for weeks let alone months? It might be TV, it might be something else, but day after day you have to fill hours in order to be getting nowhere.

Yet it feels like ‘I’ve no time and can’t get ahead’, but the reality is you are devoting hours and hours to the project of distraction. Just think about how many lies you’re telling yourself for that to be the case.