The Personal Blockers to Success
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with musings that are designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is January 11, 2025.
Last week, I asked the rhetorical question: “Are there secrets to success?” My answer was an emphatic NO. The ingredients to success are hiding in plain sight and we’re going to spend the next few episodes talking about what success is, what it means to you, and how to achieve success.
I ended last week’s Muse with a recommendation to work on yourself first. That step one was to define your desired future state. That you download my Personal Planning Guidebook, and get cracking on defining your purpose and a vision for your future. The Guidebook contains a tactile exercise called the Personal A3, which encourages individual reflection on key questions that must be answered to make progress toward the achievement of your desired future state. These questions include:
Who are your coaches and mentors? Who will you rely on for advice and support on the journey? Do you know who your mentors are? Do you know what a mentor does for you? Do you know the difference between a mentor and a coach?
What’s your asset inventory? What physical/non-physical assets do you possess today that will help you make progress? Do you have access to resources that others don’t? Are you wicked smart or possess a finely-tuned emotional intelligence toolkit? Do you hold a degree, certification, or credential that can help set you apart?
What externalities do you face? What is it about your current environment and surroundings that may accelerate you or hold you back? Do you live in a rural area where access to infrastructure is limited?
What are your personal blockers? Our worst critic lives inside our own minds. Do you come from a family where education, creativity, and entrepreneurship were discouraged? Do you lack self-confidence? Have an overly negative view of yourself and your abilities?
What skills do you need to develop to reach your goals? What should I be focusing on right now as a lifelong learner?
The Personal A3 is a tool that’s designed to help you bring more clarity into your life and help you develop a roadmap to reach your desired future state. Although a time-bound vision statement is one of the key outputs of the process, vision and success are not necessarily the same thing. If you achieve your 5 year vision statement based on your self-selected metrics for success, will you think of yourself as “being successful” or will you have “achieved success?”
Bias and Your Personal Blockers
To align the achievement of our vision statement with feelings of success, we need to focus on our personal blockers. Remember that we are our own worst critic. It’s entirely possible that we check all the boxes—the metrics for success—and have achieved our vision and our desired future state. The question is, what will our worst critic—aka, the itty bitty shitty committee (IBSC)—say about our achievement? Will we find a sense of inner peace, accomplishment, self-confidence, and contentment, or will we tell ourselves that what we’ve done isn’t good enough?
I’ll use myself as an example. I have set goals and vision statements in the past, achieved them with flying colors and have still felt restless, incomplete, and dissatisfied. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight—and yes, the gift of perspective is waiting for you as you age—I can look back on achievements that left me feeling empty and the root cause was, in most cases, the IBSC.
Turns out that the opinions of my IBSC were highly influenced by what other people thought success meant for me. More money. More position. More authority. More recognition. Big muscles. A ripped midsection, and the list goes on. Societal expectations & peer pressure had injected significant bias in me and steered me away from what was really important.
The problem was that I didn’t know what was really important to me. I just knew what was important to others. Self-reflection and curiosity about what mattered to me was not encouraged in my youth. Independent, introspective thought was labeled as weakness and was not a “manly pursuit.” The lack of coaching and guidance to determine what mattered to me meant that my IBSC was ripe for undue influence and manipulation. Third-party expectations were driving the bus, not me.
So what’s the lesson today? Get to know your IBSC and encourage others in your orbit to do the same. We all have an IBSC. We all have that set of voices in our head that tells us we’re not good enough and second guesses our decisions. Engage in self-reflection to become more aware of the biases that may lurk in their messages and motivations. Use the knowledge of potential internal biases as a check against your chosen vision statement and desired future state. Doing so will help ensure more alignment between the achievement of your vision statement and feelings of success.
Remember that your definition of success is one-size-fits-you. Avoid falling into the trap of adopting someone else’s definition of success. Oh, and asking for third-party help to identify and overcome biases that have accumulated over time is not weakness, it is strength. Therapy is not a dirty word.
Grace. Dignity. Compassion.
