The Bad Habit Most Likely to Keep You from Reaching Your Potential
There is one bad habit in particular that is the most likely culprit from keeping you from reaching your potential. This bad habit is not being able to trust yourself to do what you say you’re going to do.
If you constantly let yourself down, it begins to define you as a person. Promises are made and broken consistently. Falling into this trap is a recipe for an immense amount of struggle with personal growth and pursuing goals until you change. But old habits die hard. What’s more, breaking the habit of breaking promises to yourself is one of the hardest habits to break.
The fact is, the first time you break a promise to yourself, it’s hard. You have a sense of guilt and feel bad that you didn’t keep your word. The second time you do this, it gets easier. The third time, you don’t even think about it. Then, from that point forward promises made to yourself mean nothing.
As a result, one of the most important things you can do to further your chances of reaching your potential is to prevent the first time, and if necessary, do whatever it takes to prevent the next time if you slip up. This requires mental toughness. Moreover, mental toughness is a skill. Just like most skills, mental toughness is not something you can have just because you want it and need it. It takes patience, persistence, and planning to develop mental toughness.
If you want to develop your mental toughness, I suggest you take these four steps:
- Identify experts who have mental toughness in the way you want to have it.
- Figure out what they are doing (by either interviewing them or through thorough research) to allow them to have that type of mental toughness.
- Come up with a plan to use practice techniques that will allow you to do what they are doing the same way.
- If you have trouble with any of the above steps, hire an expert mental skills coach who has experience helping people like you improve their mental toughness.