BIYS Challenge Day 3: Habits that Limit You and How You Can Get Rid of Them

If you pick up any book or click on any YouTube video about success, the author of that book or creator of that video is going to mention daily habits. Small changes make a huge difference, and that largely applies to changing your mentality surrounding your fears.

We often don’t know the behaviors that limit us, so I’m going to list behaviors that feed your fears and/or are reflections of them.

Negative Self Talk

“I’m so ugly”; “I’m going to be alone forever”; “I have ZERO talents”; “I look like a potato”. Do these sound familiar? Speaking like this to, and about yourself affirms the idea that you are not good enough; it convinces your brain that you cannot achieve your goals and that you don’t deserve happiness, success, and love. So when the idea of going for your dreams and desires passes through your mind, it’s immediately shot down by those negative things you’ve been feeding yourself all day.

You’ve fed your brain so many negative ideas about yourself and your life that your brain isn’t comfortable with ideas that are positive. It recognizes thoughts about you achieving and being deserving of happiness and peace in this life as something to be afraid of and avoid because you’ve normalized the opposite.

Procrastination

We are all guilty of procrastinating. Now of course there is the procrastination of things we simply don’t want to do, but I’m talking about the procrastination of things you know are for your benefit, but you still put off.

This connects to the negative self talk, in that, again, your brain is not comfortable with you engaging in behaviors that are outside of what it’s used to. It recognizes any new changes to your daily habits as something to be afraid and avoid; and saying, ‘I’ll start tomorrow’, ‘I’ll do it later’, ‘It’ll get done eventually’, or ‘One more show/video’, is a reflection of this fear your brain has of change, even it’s for the better.

Not Setting Boundaries and Limits (For Both Yourself and Others)

When you let people walk all over you, that is a reflection of how you think you deserve to be treated. You’re afraid to tell people they’ve violated or offended you because you’re afraid of disapproval from others. You attach your worth to what others think of you, and you think giving them unlimited access to you is the way to keep you in their good graces.

And not only do you let others walk all over you, you do the same thing to yourself. You let those self-limiting beliefs and ideas control your life. You know what is best for you, you know what you need to do to achieve your dreams, but you let that voice stop you. Every. Single. Time. This, again, reinforces the fear your brain has of anything new, and keeps you in the cycle of living an unhappy and unfulfilled life.

Despite these daily habits being absolutely horrible, there are solutions to all of them.

Positive Affirmations

I’ve said it once, and I will say it a million times again if I have to: the way to eliminate negative self talk is to replace it with positive self talk. You CAN achieve. You ARE gorgeous. You WILL succeed. You DESERVE love and happiness. You have to overcome that negative voice in your head telling you that doing this is silly, or a waste of time. Remember that those negative thoughts are your brain trying to keep you ‘safe’ from the unknown, because it’s afraid of new things and has been programmed to associate positivity with something to avoid. Acknowledge those negative thoughts but don’t entertain them; whenever you get a negative thought, flip it. Here are some examples:

I’m so ugly → flip → I’m not ugly.

I can’t do this → flip → This is really difficult, but I can definitely do this.

My body sucks → flip → My body is amazing.

Today was terrible → flip → Today had a lot of challenging moments, but I’m making it through anyway.

Find a way to flip the negative into a positive. You won’t believe it at first, but I can guarantee those negative thoughts will become less and less frequent over time.

Setting a Schedule

Telling yourself you have time is one of the biggest lies you can tell yourself. You don’t have time -- none of us do. You saw how fast 2020 went by, we only have four more months until 2021. And when you look back at the year, you think ‘Where did the time go?’

Even if you set 10 minutes aside a day to work on one of your goals, that is better than doing absolutely nothing. 10 minutes sounds like a lot of time, but it isn’t compared to 24 hours. Your brain telling you that committing 10 minutes to exercising, researching for your business, reading a book or doing anything else that will challenge you to be better, is just your brain projecting your fears. Acknowledge the thoughts, and get the work done anyway.

And here’s a tip, small changes make a huge difference. Don’t try to start living your life with every single minute planned out if you’re not used to it. Because, 1) plans usually never pan out the way they are written down and 2) you’re not going to stick to something dramatically different from the way you lived your life before. So start small and work your way up.

Set Boundaries and Limits for Yourself and Others

Let’s start with others first: stop letting people treat you bad. You don’t have to be others’ therapist. You don’t have to be their shoulder to cry on. You don’t have to be their punching bag. You don’t have to sacrifice your needs and desires for the satisfaction of someone who doesn’t (and wouldn’t) do the same for you. That is draining you emotionally, physically and mentally because you’re constantly giving without receiving the same in return. It’s not selfish for you to set boundaries; it’s selfish for THEM to be using you to their advantage without even trying to return the favor. Stop running to always be someone else’s savior and start prioritizing yourself.

As for yourself, you know you’re not supposed to be up at 3:30 am watching YouTube videos. You know you’re not supposed to be eating whole containers of candy and cookies because it’s stunting your health journey. You know you’re not supposed to go the whole day without drinking water. So why do you let yourself do these things? All of these end up hurting you in the long run, and discourages you from making any positive change. Set goals for yourself to reach everyday, even if it’s drinking two bottles of water a day, or eating half a container of cookies instead of the whole thing. Again, small changes make a big difference.

Start paying attention to the daily behaviors you have that keep you from succeeding. The first step to making long-lasting change is always identifying the problems first, and then creating solutions. You’ve been provided both within this article, so you have no room for excuses. I believe in you. You got this.

I’ll catch you all again on Friday for our post about what successful people have to say about fear.

Love and Light,

Azé