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Mental Hurdles

Thoughts and mentality that keeps us from excellence

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Cleaning Your Kitchen

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Making money and being successful in life is like cooking a meal. The ingredients are your ideas, but in the end, you have to get cooking. I went all over the internet getting great ideas on how to get ahead in life, but my mind was not ready to take those ingredients and turn them into the end goal. My kitchen was dirty meaning my mind wasn’t ready to turn those ideas into meals.

What Does it Mean to Clean One’s Kitchen?

I started using the phrase cleaning your kitchen a while now and don’t know if I made it up or got it from somewhere else. The kitchen in this sense is one’s mind. Like a real kitchen, I do my best cooking when the kitchen is clean from the start. When it comes to my mind, there are so many things that cloud my thoughts and act as noise that keeps my mind from working at maximum efficiency.

Really, this is what this site is all about. Getting the mind in a position so that it can do the things it is destined to do. I want to get where I want to go. I want to live life on my own terms, but until I clear out the mess in my mind, I will never be able to do so. I am, however, on the right track and I started with the biggest step which was me deciding that I was WILLING to do what it takes to start down this road. For me, it was to start taking accountability for my actions. I had a 20 year old DUI that I finally went to the courts to face the charges. I ended up doing jail time and I was on probation for a year and a half. I was told by many people at the time that I was treated unfairly, but I wouldn’t be where I am now without it. I’m not saying that everyone needs jail and a probation sentence to get thorough their mental hurdles. What I am saying is that a person may need to put themself in a position to encourage a change in behavior. So what could I have done to mitigate my shortcomings and get myself in this same position without having to involve the court system.

What Could/Should I Have Done Differently?

I see now the easiest thing I could have done was surrounded myself with people who were making their self better in some kind of way. A part of my sentence was to become a part of a sobriety program. Going through a program would have been a great place to start since I needed to get sober, but I wouldn’t have done it on my own. I had such a stigma about those programs that I would never have subjected myself to one.

Church could have been an option, but it could not have been the church I grew up in. I needed an entirely different environment. I had to fundamentally change everything, from friends, to habits, to where I went to church, to the books I read. They all needed to change, but I didn’t truly know that until I was on my path to mental fitness.

“I see now the easiest thing I could have done was surrounded myself with people who were making their self better”

HIBaS

How I became a stepdad-The breathalyzer

How I Became A Stepdad-The Breathalyzer

I got to the point in life where I needed to change quickly, I had gotten a DUI 20 years(!!!) prior and avoided the responsibility of the repercussions all that time. But it was hanging over my head and restricted me from being truly free. I rarely had an ID, and I couldn’t drive whih made it so that I had to cater my life to busses, walking, taxis, and ride-sharing companies later down the line.  I was so afraid of taking responsibility that my bad habits were thriving as I continued down this long rabbit hole of avoidance. Making the decision to avoid responsibility allowed other bad decisions to piggyback along and the guilt from them made it easier to avoid progress. As I went on this path, my self-esteem dropped making me feel I was unworthy of accomplishing what I was capable of. It was like the law of inertia, bad decisions stayed in motion as my true inner self stayed at rest. I had to stop it. I had to plant my feet on the ground and say no more!

Now, it wasn’t that easy and it took a lot of nagging from family members, especially Mama, that was my grandma from Alabama so no sugarcoating from her. “You better go see about your license” is what she constantly told me. I hated to hear it then, but I am ever so grateful now. Without her urging, where would I be now? Drunk? High? Dead? I digress though because that is not the point. It doesn’t matter how much nagging or how much sense something makes. It had to be my decision to get it done. I had to be willing to face the consequences, and there were many, but in all the ways my life was more difficult it never spurned me to make the change. It was only until I was WILLING to do it.

Willing is a word I’ve grown interested in since this life turnaround. You will beat yourself up with should, want, or need, but it’s until you are willing to do it is when things will be different. I wanted to stop excessive drinking and doing drugs, but was I willing to say no to those things? Better yet, was I willing to say yes for the life I was destined to live? What even was the life I was to live? I had checked out so long ago I didn’t know where I left off.

 Fast forward ahead and we are at my then girlfriend’s daughters track meet. She rode with the school, but she wants to go home early since she was done with her events. At this point in my life, I have a breathalyzer in my car. The breathalyzer was used, of course, to start the car for one, but the kicker was that I had to periodically blow in it to keep the car running. So, on a drive that took more than an hour, I knew she was going to notice something me and her mom had previously kept from the kids.

I thought it would be the end of the world, but she later stated that her thought was, whatever the reason the breathalyzer was in the car that I was no longer that person. Wow, she was seventeen years old and able to make that determination? It was all because I chose to make changes and I was willing to see them through. 

It’s never too late to change and it is not impossible. Worst people have overcome worst things in their life.

Breaking Seal

Breaking the Seal: How To Get Derailed From Accomplishing Any Goal.

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Whether the goal is to quit smoking, cut junk foods, or anything else that takes work to achieve, sticking to the goal and not relenting to internal or external pressure is they key to success. This is the “Old Self” coming to seize control. The further along towards a goal we go, the more the old self wants to regain control and subvert progress. Old self is resilient and will always lurk until it finds a weak moment to pounce and regain its position as the one running the show. The first time a promise is broken to oneself is the most difficult, it only gets easier from there. No matter if that it was agonizing or easy, the first time is the most resistance the mind will put up. This makes coming back from the broken promise more difficult.            

           The easiest person for me to break a promise against is myself. With others there seems to be some moral obligation to fulfill what I’ve promised to do. With me, I have an easy time going against what I’ve set out to do. Why? I just racked my brain trying to find an answer, I thought I should have three things that came to mind. I thought they would come quickly, but the only thing I thought was that it is ok for me to be lied to which is an issue with worthiness. So why do I feel unworthy of having promises kept towards me?Whether the goal is to quit smoking, cut junk foods, or anything else that takes work to achieve, sticking to the goal and not relenting to internal or external pressure is they key to success. This is the “Old Self” coming to seize control. The further along towards a goal we go, the more the old self wants to regain control and subvert progress. Old self is resilient and will always lurk until it finds a weak moment to pounce and regain its position as the one running the show. The first time a promise is broken to oneself is the most difficult, it only gets easier from there. No matter if that it was agonizing or easy, the first time is the most resistance the mind will put up. This makes coming back from the broken promise more difficult. 

           
            I am capable of handling disappointment or is it that I expect to be disappointed and it is my way of fulfilling that expectation. Thinking about it, I believe it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I feel comfortable, in some twisted way, of being mistreated. It makes me comfortable and is probably a way of me not achieving excellence. Why? Because I am not comfortable with these feelings. My brain is not comfortable with achievement to this level, if I were to stay my commitments to myself it (my brain) would feel there is a threat to my wellbeing. The brain’s purpose is to keep us from being harmed so if it is fed the wrong information it will produce the wrong solution. It is seen all the time with athletes. If an athlete’s brain is not comfortable with a high level of success, he may post a scathing video online making a team think twice about drafting him, in a declared for draft situation. His mind will lead him to act in a way that is detrimental to his success because he is not psychologically ready for success. Not pre-draft, but afterwards at the onset of his career, Ryan Leaf comes to mind. He sabotaged his whole career because he was not ready for success.

            

            A lot of people see others who seemingly have it all and wonder how they can throw it all away. The change that needs to happen is not to delete their online profiles or if the person drinks too much, to stop going to bars or have liquor in the house. Though those may be good temporary fixes, they are nearly bandages and the source of the problem needs to be addressed to truly fix the problem.

            Breaking the seal can start out small. It is much easier to start with a little white lie than to jump right into the deep end. It is like the way you cook a live frog. When an action is done to sabotage oneself, it can take the urgency of trying to save one’s own life because, in a way, it is. Or at least that is how the mind sees it. The mind can be like a drama queen and think “if I fuck this up, I’ll just die.” It will not say it to its host like that, it will say things like, “you deserve to go out and get wasted after all the work you’ve done.” It is lying to you. The devil does not attack the heart first, it attacks your mind and it has you kill your heart.