The fastest way to waste your potential
One of the worst things about procrastinating and avoiding the tasks that would get you to where you want to be is the years you waste never moving a single inch. You look back a year, or two, or five, or even a decade, and that ambition you’ve had in the back of your mind still looms over you.
Or you’ve spent the entire time working toward it the best way you know how, but every single step is an uphill battle–and it feels like there are boulders tied around your ankles.
But what if there is something worse waiting at the end of all of this?
What if you keep fighting and fighting, hoping that it will get easier as soon as you cross the inevitable finish line… but it never, ever gets easier, even after you’ve “made it?” Even after you’ve become the person you thought you wanted to be, both in small daily habits and large accomplishments?
There is a reason you are resisting so hard right now for something you know intellectually that you want dearly. But it’s a warning sign you can’t ignore, or else that finish line where the disconnect fades will never appear.
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When you care deeply about a goal, it’s more then just thinking about it and planning for it and committing time to trying to execute it. It’s the emotional weight it carries. This constant ache to achieve this external goal that you can hardly think about anything else.
But these goals don’t have to be monumental, like pining for medical school or a political position. It can be an unquenchable urge to meet your internal standard for cleaning your home, or taking care of your body, or working out, or cooking, or a hobby… it doesn’t have to make sense to everyone else, because it makes sense to you. Because to you, you have to do it. You have to become the person who has done it.
And yet, despite that intense need, you… can’t. You wind yourself up with motivation and inspiration about how important it is and why it needs to get done and how you are going to get it done. But when it comes time to move forward and to take action, you stall. Any effort you manage fizzles out and isn’t sustained, so no real improvement is ever achieved.
There is a dissonance inside of you because you desperately want this thing, and desperately avoid it for seemingly no reason. And it is the same every single day. It was the same a year ago. It was the same five years ago.
And it will be the same tomorrow, and in a year, and in five years.
You know you want it. But you don’t know why you can’t have it. And you will waste your life continuing to search for something that doesn’t want to be found.
An inexplicable weight grows within you and pulls you down every time this cycle repeats–and you’re left wondering what’s wrong with you.
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You aren’t the only ambitious person to go through this, first of all. I’ve observed it in every single person who seems to have this vision of who they wish to be, yet sabotages their efforts.
But I saw it in myself first. I had an entire life planned out of becoming a musician because I absolutely loved singing and I was extremely good at it. It’s what everyone expected me to do. But every step I took toward fulfilling that dream was followed by two steps back.
And this inner turmoil ate away at me for years–because I wanted something I wouldn’t let myself have. So when I was forced to face my failures, when I had to come to terms with why I was so unbelievably miserable even though I was actively trying to do what I claimed to love… I realized that the most important piece was misaligned the entire time.
The goal was never mine to begin with.
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It sounds strange to say that out loud, because how can that be true? I loved singing. I loved music. I was good at it. And everyone else expected me to go into it as a career because it was a talent I was meant to share with others. But I had never internalized what that meant. What an operatic career looks like, what it would require of me, and what I had to sacrifice to get there. So while I loved singing, I did not love 99% of what made up this goal–but I had adopted it as my own. I convinced myself that every piece of it intoxicated me when it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Other examples are medical students trying to earn their families approval. Or in everyday life when we “commit” to working out everyday or being on a diet because that’s what we “should” be doing. Or that we need to be keeping our home as clean as possible all of the time because that’s what was determined as the “right thing to do” on social media. Or we should be making all of our food from scratch due to what an influencer says.
There’s nothing wrong with these choices in isolation. Go to medical school, workout everyday, get on a diet, keep your home meticulously clean, or make all of your food from scratch if it would bring you fulfillment. But up until now, those goals haven’t been. They’ve been bringing you approval–or the illusion of it. And we often don’t have the skills at first to understand the nuance of what fulfillment even means.
If you become truly aligned with your gifts, then your goals never have to look a certain way because the only important constant is you. How you operate. Your values. Your behavior. Not an external achievement or marker of success.
But if you continue to perform for approval and to feel worthy once that goal is completed, then you will always be facing an uphill battle to capture that flag. You will never find happiness in the actions themselves. And, more likely than not, you will sabotage yourself every step of the way–because you know intrinsically that something isn’t right. And you will waste years upon years of your life because of it.
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Humor me for just a moment.
Take a goal that’s very important to you that you’ve been completely sabotaging your efforts on. I said an important goal, not a big one–whether it’s a new diet or going to medical school.
Take away all external factors of this goal. I mean that no one would ever hear about it, comment on it, know about it. You would never gain any money from it. You wouldn’t gain any status from it. Take away the expectations to do it a certain way and focus on the core of what lies within the goal itself.
Does it still feel meaningful without these factors? That’s all I want you to ask yourself.
Look for areas in your life that lose enthusiasm when you take away all of these external factors. Then consider giving them a closer look. They may be a sign of something much bigger going on.
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If you’ve read enough of this content to finally accept that it isn’t supposed to be this hard to do the important things, then book a call HERE.
During our conversation, we'll dig into what's actually going on beneath the surface. We'll explore the specific patterns driving your procrastination, overthinking, avoidance, perfectionism, or inconsistency.
And if I think it’s the right next step, I’ll give you all of the information regarding The Intrinsic North Star, an entire step-by-step program and exclusive community helping you walk from beginning to end of this struggle. It was built by years of struggle, countless interviews with people just like you, and thousands of pages of research.
My goal isn't to convince you of anything. It's to help you understand your situation with greater clarity and determine what the next step is for you to finally be free.
If that sounds like the conversation you need, you can book a call HERE.
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Failing to commit to an important goal does not always equate to laziness. In fact, chances are that if you’re watching this video, it isn’t your story. I don’t make these videos to appeal to everyone–only those whose story they are telling.
Rather, the resistance you’re feeling could be a sign to re-examine the destination, not an indicator of your worth as a person.
But, sometimes, the goal is aligned after all. You genuinely do want whatever it is, like going to the gym regularly or working on a book, for example.
But there is this implicit feeling that you can only begin after feeling motivated. You’ve probably heard the advice that motivation comes after action, but that does nothing to help you when you have no idea how to start.
There is something greater at play, and “waiting for motivation” will hang over you until you reveal it. That’s the explanation I’m offering you in the next video HERE that dissects waiting for motivation that never comes.
Don’t forget to subscribe if you’re ready to stop letting these patterns control you. And if you’ve heard enough and know that what you need is a path to follow that takes out the guesswork… then book a call using the link below.
And as always, stay in this corner of the internet as long as you need.
