You're Holding Back: Two Ways To Break Through

Where are you right now relative to the goals and vision you set at the beginning of the year?

Maybe you’ve made steady progress. Or maybe you’ve spent the last eight months reacting in survival mode, just bouncing from one thing to the next. Either way, this moment is a critical checkpoint. You can’t go back and change the first eight months of the year—but you can decide exactly what the next five months will look like.

The Trap of Competing Desires

At the start of this year, I invited you to fast-forward in your mind to the end of the year and ask yourself a simple question: What is the story you want to tell a friend you haven't seen in a year?

Real personal growth requires two things: reflecting back and aspiring forward. But when you think about that idea agitating inside your mind—whether it’s starting a YouTube channel, launching a newsletter, or writing a book—how does it actually make you feel?

• Excited?
• Overwhelmed? 
• Scared?

We often wonder why we sit on the couch instead of working on the things we claim we want to accomplish. The answer comes down to competing desires.

Just this morning, I dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to take my son fishing. I am not a morning person. It was hard to get up, bed was comfortable, and we didn't even catch anything (which happens a lot!). In that moment, two desires were at war: the immediate comfort of sleep versus the future reward of an experience with my son.

To move forward on your project, you have to want that future state more than the current state you're in.

When we let fear drive us—fear of embarrassment or fear of failure—we end up creating an anti-vision. I had a fear of failure for a long time, and ironically, that fear resulted in me fostering a lot of failure in my life. Whatever vision you set before yourself—positive or negative—is where you will ultimately land.

You Aren't Meant to Do It Alone

The second reason we stall out isn't internal—it's capacity. We are limited, dependent creatures. We need relationships, community, and accountability to help us think and execute.

When I wrote my first book, Path of the Freelancer, I knew it was going to be tough to finish on my own. So, I built accountability into the process. I gathered a group of freelancers, committed to writing and sending them one chapter a month, and met with them monthly to talk about it. Eighteen months after I started, I had a published book.

Years later, while writing my second book, The Jump: From Chaos to Clarity for Your Striving Small Business—a letter to my past self reflecting on seven years of owning a marketing agency—I got stuck. To finish it, I joined a weekday blogging challenge with a group of friends, writing five days a week until the manuscript was done.

Bigger projects often exceed our individual capacity. They require a support system.

What's The Story You'll Tell?

If you missed it, the message above is a followup to my new year inspirational video.

Watch it below.