9 Unconventional Indicators That Show That You May Not (Yet) Be “Wired For Success”
In my last post, I have talked about how are career vision or our action plan may not be enough for creating a change in your work experience. The basic idea is that you need to approach making that change from a positive place, or else neither the vision nor the actions will carry and reaffirm you and have the power to bring you success.
This week, let’s look at our inner state. What we call inner state is how we experience our consciousness level, or energy level. I thought I’d expand a little on ways of seeing that we are not in a positive energetic space with our approach to becoming more successful, or more fulfilled, or more balanced in our careers. I want to share some less conventional indicators that you may not be in a success mindset yet. If you are aligned with success, abundance, the joy of earning and having money, of being seen and having an impact on the world, then you will experience less of these aspects, or with less intensity or frequency.
Inner State and Your Career: Indicators that you may not be “WIRED FOR SUCCESS”
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Overweight
Many times we eat for comfort. We eat to calm down, relax and feel better. We think that we eat to “do something good for ourselves”, even when we overdo it and harm our health and well-being. Not being aligned with success on a subconscious level has a lot to do with not loving yourself – or not enough. It is very hard to be successful when you constantly feel that you are not good enough, or should make more effort, or that others reject you. When we don’t love ourselves enough, we don’t rest enough and don’t allow us to do things to charge our batteries. So then, we have to charge them by eating, following our most primal instinct.
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Exaggerated Need to Help
Are you the go-to-person for your friends and family – or anyone (?) – who needs help? Have they learnt that you always have a solution and are ready to support them and make them feel better?
Here come the important questions: Do they get to help you as much as you do them? Are you ready and able to ask for help, and to receive it? You may say that you don’t need it. But everything in life has to be balanced. There is a strong pattern people have to help others, because it makes them feel good and protects them from having to feel or look at their own limits. At a very deep level, helping without being able to receive help is giving without receiving. And how do we want to experience success, if we are not able to receive?
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Lack of Joy and Laughter
How many times a day to you laugh? Would you say that you experience joy as a frequent emotion in your life? Joy and laughter are frequently connected with the experience of high energies. It is those same high energies that we experience as flow, creativity, success, abundance, gratitude, peace, and meaning, and that come with success and happiness. Maybe you are all too focused on improving and growing, but you don’t get to laugh and enjoy your life RIGHT NOW. Chances are, that the same thing that keeps you from laughing keeps you from manifesting your dreams successfully.
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Fight Mode
People think that if they just make more effort, they can achieve what they want. Honestly, how many times does someone ask you how you are doing, and you answer something like: “I am so exhausted and tired”. But maybe making more effort happens within a hamster wheel. And it just keeps turning and turning, and you keep being exhausted.
First, it’s a sign of self-love to allow yourself to rest. And when you do, however long you need to, you can come back to work and be MUCH more effective, inspired and focused.
Second, really successful people don’t usually think that success is hard to achieve. They take many parts of it as normal. And because they do, it is easy for them to keep these parts rolling. If you are used to having money, you just take risks and don’t worry about it. And it may be those risks that help you earn more.
I think the challenge for experiencing success is going with the flow of life. If something is really hard and we experience a lot of resistance, maybe it is just not the right place or way to go about it. So if we step out of the fight, and go to where things are easier, we may be surprised of the different ways life has to support us, and our efforts will be rewarded.
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Negative Self-Talk
How many times do you think – or even say – to yourself “I’m so stupid!” I used to say this all the time, whenever something didn’t turn out “right”. It seems like a small little detail, and of course we don’t really mean it. But then, we must mean it at some level – because, why else would we keep saying it?
Whether it is this phrase or another, I would like to invite you to observe the way you treat yourself in your thoughts. Are you kind and loving? Optimistic and forgiving? Are you cheering yourself on? Are you recognizing your own successes and achievements?
Self talk is one way of perceiving the energy level: The more positive your thoughts about yourself, the higher is your energy level, the easier it is to be successful.
If you find yourself being harsh, hard on yourself and negative, you can purposefully start by correcting your negative thoughts when they occur, or by adding positive ones. You might say to yourself: “No, I am not stupid, I only made a mistake. I am smart because I learn from this mistake”.
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Perception Focus On Obstacles
Where do you focus your attention? Do you see the steps you have made, and think about ways of improving the situation and how great that can be? Or do you tend to think about the difficulties and mistakes and problems? We all tend to focus on the obstacles, because we have learned that if we focus there, we can overcome them and improve the situation. That isn’t true though. We have to look at the obstacles sometimes. But the more our thoughts focus on the negative aspects, for example, by worrying repeatedly about a difficulty, the more we manifest that negativity and more obstacles.
I have grown to understand that it’s all there at the same moment, always. There are always successes and steps forward, and there are always obstacles and failures. The question is, where we focus. And when we think more about the positive aspects, we get more energy, better ideas, more motivation, and more support. So what helps us is tuning into a positive thought field and positive energy, and doing so deliberately, and repeatedly.
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Lack Of Movement – And Sports
Inside like outside. Have you heard about this principle? Many times we apply it when someone’s office is messy or full of things. Then we say, they must be burdened interiorly, too. (As a friend of Feng Shui I invite you to try throwing things out and putting them in order – it makes a HUGE DIFFERENCE for your energy and inner state!)
The same is true for movement. When things move within us, they do outside, and vice versa. If we are stuck on the outside, it’s because something holds us back interiorly. I have found that when we allow ourselves to move, in whatever way, other areas of our life get moving, too. So, why not try doing sports and running – and let it affect your career?!
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Rejecting Your Parents
Do you sometimes think “I don’t want to be like my mother” or “I don’t want to be like my father”? Those kinds of thoughts are a strong indicator that you have disconnected from the flow of life, and that it’s likely you are not ready to experience a better career or work situation. How so?
Life flows like a river, and that’s a one-way movement: It comes to you through your parents, and goes on to your children – and a business project can be your “child” in many ways. If you cut the river, it can’t continue, easy as that.
Ironically, being in a position of resistance to our parents or ancestors actually makes us more like them. The more we resist something, the more we manifest it. That is true for emotional experiences, but also for certain parts of ourselves or our past. Life just has a way of forcing us to become more loving, understanding and forgiving.
I am not saying that you HAVE to be like your parents. I am saying, that you are. At the very least, you, like any human, have the potential of acting like they did. When you find a place of compassion, forgiveness and understanding, you will be able to understand why for them there was no other choice. And when you do, you can experience empathy about our human condition with its flaws and all its suffering. So in many cases, connecting with the part of our ancestors that we don’t initially like, means expanding for us, and getting more choices to be different. But then we choose something different from a place of connectedness and a sense of belonging.
In one sentence: It is much easier to create a successful and abundant life when we do it thanking our ancestors for their hardships, suffering and effort, then when we use our energy to fight off the experience of those things within our selves.
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Unbalanced Or Negative Relationships
Do your friends and the people around you make you big? Do they make you shine, believe in yourself, take risks, and feel nurtured and supported? Do they give you energy and strengthen you?
Having relationships that take away our energy or make us limit ourselves to a smaller version of ourselves is another sign that we are not in alignment with success. When we have a success mindset, that also expresses in loving ourselves, knowing our worth, and living the fact that we deserve the best. That is not only the case in our work, but also with our friends. If you stick around people who wear you down, you have to ask yourself, why you are choosing that kind of experience for yourself. Maybe you are scared of conflict, or you feel that you need others’ approval or support. Maybe you don’t trust yourself or you feel that you can’t ask for more.
There is a Spanish saying that I find really true: Better alone than in bad company. When being alone becomes something beautiful and joyful because you treat yourself so nicely and you love yourself, that’s when success shows up without even asking for it.
It’s Easy: Change Your Inner State in Order to Change Your Career
Don’t be overwhelmed by al these indicators. If you have all of them, it may be no more difficult to get ahead and in alignment with yourself than if you just have one of them. Why? Because it may be enough that you carry one traumatic experience with you, or have “subscribed” to a negative mindset, or are disaligned from your roots – just one source of negative energy in your system can create one or all of the symptoms I spoke about.
It is all connected, all the different aspects of our life and our experience. If you feel you are not worthy, you will likely not treat your body well, nor experience being appreciated by others, nor earn what you deserve to earn. Different outside experiences can go back to the same inner source of negativity. We carry it with us, and then project in onto whatever situation comes along. And we can keep doing it for a long time, because we have not learned to perceive it, and to let it go or transform it.
The good news is, change can be easy and fast. And any negativity you have taken on – YOU CAN LET IT GO. Growing up, we learn how to train our mind, how to focus, learn and concentrate, how to take care of our bodies, health and daily care. Learning to do an energetic transformation, and a daily energetic “hygiene” may be something that just ads some really powerful tools and possibilities to your life. And it can be as natural as it is now to brush your teeth before you go to bed. And then, however many of the symptoms you now experience, they will get less, become weaker, or not even affect you at all anymore.
If you liked this post, you may like:
Career Development – Why Successful People Stop Being (More) Successful
Career Coaching – What Your Need To Be Successful
ReSource Yourself and Your Career – Our 10-Weeks Signature Program
