Expectations, motivation, excitement, and confidence are high.  You have a plan and are ready to cause something to happen.  Don’t you just love the beginning stages of a new undertaking?

But what happens when the planning stage is over and it’s time to start executing he plan?  This is where challenges start to arise and where the excitement and confidence can begin to wane, as we face uncertainty, doubt, fear, and our own negative self-talk.  Left unchecked, these feelings can begin to cause us to re-evaluate the goals and dreams we have for ourselves, and adjust them down to a level that doesn’t seem as scary and challenging.  The worst case would be that we abandon our dreams completely, and return to our lives as they were, being ever-haunted by regret and the thoughts of…”what if…” or “I wonder if I could have done it”.  Personally, those are thoughts I don’t want to saddle my future self with the burden of carrying.

I’m currently in the process of learning how to do voice overs and will soon begin doing that professionally.  As I look at some of the things I need to do, I can easily get overwhelmed.  Along with that come the familiar feelings of fear, doubt, and the negative self-talk saying that perhaps I should consider backing down, and just go back to doing what I’ve been doing.  When these thoughts come, I immediately remind myself what I don’t want to just settle for what comes along in life, but I choose to chart the course that I want for myself.  I also remind myself that everything I need to do does not have to be completed that day, or even that week.  The goal I’ve set for myself is steady progress on a daily and weekly basis.

The main thing I’ve been doing is visualizing what success looks like.  Doing so causes me to get a feeling of what it would be like to achieve this goal, making it more difficult for me to decide to give up before I even get started.

I’m convinced that the biggest barrier to greatness people face is their willingness to settle for the easy route versus persevering through initial struggles on the road to achieving personal success.  We’re too unwilling to endure struggle, too unwilling to stretch out of our comfort zones for an extended period of time.  I want to flip that thinking around.  Instead of being too unwilling to stretch out of my comfort zone, I choose instead to be unwilling to settle for taking the easy route and whatever happens to come along.

Where have you been settling?  What are you unwilling to settle for any longer?