My best advice #3: Get out of your own prison

I noticed that I set myself limits that hold me back, at least sometimes. This is unfortunately a common behavior, and in the end it prevents me from growing and developing.

What limits do I set myself?

A good example is that I would love to take time off and just do my own thing. That means business, blog, my personal daily routines and so on. Funnily enough, I am in the privileged situation that I could do that without any problem, at least for one year.

But I honestly hate the thought that I would have to eat – even partially – into my saving and investment assets. That’s why I’m sticking to a 100% job at the moment and continuing to raise everything else on the side.

My need for security with regard to my asset cushion is enormously high, but this is also a problem from another perspective: the more assets I accumulate, the less I want them to be consumed.

Mostly because every euro I have less cannot work for me and generate more money. So it’s like a vicious circle.

“You are 100 percent responsible for what you do in your life.”

Gary John Bishop

In the past, I was often told that I couldn’t do many things, even though I had never tried them. Often, you can’t really do them because you subconsciously tell yourself that you won’t succeed, not because you aren’t able to. So I did not even try.

Now I just try things out and see if I like them, and after a while it becomes clear whether I succeed or fail.

A good example is photography. I started taking pictures at a very young age, and I stuck to it over two decades. Deciding to make a business out of it, I was used to hear some family members and friends saying that I won’t succeed, that I couldn’t do it.

Anyone who has been in a similar situation will know what comes next: You can decide to make these beliefs become reality, as you stop following your dreams. Or you decide to try anyway and to face all the difficulties that come with it.

Photography is not black magic and running a (very) small business neither. You can learn a lot by yourself, you can ask people who already walked this path for advice and then you get used to it.

Am I now a world famous photographer the most prestigious magazines want to work with?

Not at all! But I am going in the right direction, and you know what? I will stick to it, until I fail or succeed. Because doing nothing is worse than failing, as I won’t learn any life lessons or gain any experience. Not to mention I won’t have the possibility of achieving my goals and growing into a better version of myself.

The advice I can give you is to stop holding yourself back and to start taking the chance of bringing your intentions into action.

It is about little things. Little things that we can change. For this we do not need an hour a day, not even ten minutes. We don’t need silence or undisturbed moments either. We simply need to learn to listen to ourselves again. And then we need to reflect on what we have heard, so that we can then identify what needs to change. Nothing more, nothing less.

Recommended reading

A great book about self-acceptance and developing an awareness of how we treat ourselves and how we think about ourselves is “Unfuck Yourself” by Gary John Bishop*.

Furthermore, the author explains in a very clear way how we influence our reality and our feelings through our self-talk – the conversations we have with ourselves in our thoughts.

For example, the author points out that we are always talking about what we WILL do, and at the same time he raises the question of why we don’t just change the verb when we want to do something. We certainly will not lose weight when we say we will lose weight. “Will” always refers to the future but we need to act now in order to change the future. We could just as well say that we are losing weight now, and act accordingly.

* Was der Stern bedeutet:
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