Today I have four emails I need to send. They’re big requests, and my fear is that I’ll get a “no” on every one of them. So I’m putting it off. I’m procrastinating. To be honest, I’m considering just giving up and not sending the emails at all.
Have you ever been there? You want to give up before you even start? That’s self-defeating, but we all do stuff like this.
Here are three habits we should work hard to kill.
Borrowing bad from the past.
We’ve all been burned in the past. We’ve all been told “no” or had someone say mean things to us. No matter how bad your past has been, you aren’t alone.
But we can’t afford to assume the future will look exactly like the bad from the past. If we do that, we give up before even trying. We don’t look for new friends. We don’t make that big ask we need. We don’t take a risk.
That’s a self-defeating habit, and it’s time to stop.
Forgetting good from the past.
What’s even crazier is that we often forget the good from the past. If you’ve experienced success or a big “yes” from God, it should be something that gives you boldness for the future. More often, though, we assume that good thing from the past won’t happen again. We think it was a fluke.
We need to focus less on the bad from the past and start borrowing more of the good from the past.
Limiting yourself to what you’ve seen.
Finally, we often assume there’s no more than what we’ve seen. But that’s a dangerous comparison that limits you to only what’s been done before. There’s no opportunity for trailblazing or innovation with that type of thinking.
It reminds me of the Myspace/Facebook battles in the past. Facebook might have been late to the game, but they didn’t limit themselves to what Myspace had done before. Myspace was massively successful with 80 million users at one point. But Facebook didn’t limit themselves to what they’d seen before. They did something nobody has ever done. They got 1.5 billion users.
What you’ve seen is merely the start. That’s the baseline for what’s possible in your life. There’s so much more available beyond that.
We have to stop limiting ourselves through self-defeating habits and thought processes. God has so much in store for you—it might not be wealth or fame—but it’s better stuff than you could possibly imagine.