How to push through our own invisible barriers

One topic I love to return from time to time, is how to keep pushing through our own invisible barriers.  It’s something I find difficult and I have to keep working at it constantly.  We all have them, we can’t see them, yet we feel comfortable inside them.  I usually have no problem motivating myself and I absolutely love learning new things.  I push myself, I work harder and then whoa …. the brakes go on, my heels dig in the ground as I screech to a halt in front of my own invisible barriers.  No, no, no I tell myself, what if I try this new thing and I look stupid or I make a mistake.  BUT, this is the strange thing about making mistakes, the more you make, the more comfortable and confident you start to feel and hey, you get better at what you’re doing.  Go figure!

Now that I can meet people face-to-face again for my Saturday morning boot camps (woo hoo!), it obviously means that I can no longer do a Zoom session.  As much as I’d like to, I can’t be in two places at once.  So, in a bid to help those people who can’t make it to Saturdays in person, and by popular demand I have to say, I agreed to make a video so they could still keep to their routine.  


I soon discovered that speaking into a camera to yourself is not the same as when you’re interacting with a whole group of people that you can see in front of you.  You feel self-conscious on your own and you feel like everything has to be perfect so you stop and do a re-take, then another and another.  This takes time, a LOT of time, which quite honestly is something I never seem to have much of on any given day.  I realised that I couldn’t keep on re-shooting my videos and that I’d have to just go with the flow, roll with the punches and laugh through any mistakes I made or Mr Bob banging about in the kitchen.  


Turns out my fitness lot absolutely love it when I do something daft or something happens, they say it’s more real life and not as staged.  The positive effect of this is that I’m starting to feel more comfortable about making mistakes in general.  I don’t get as hung up on the fact that people are going to think I’m a complete idiot.  It’s even made me feel more confident at work, I’ve taken the initiative on things more and spoken up in meetings.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not 100% comfortable and I’m not sure I ever will be, it’s in my nature to worry about what people think of me, but I’m learning to move on quickly if I do make a bit of a ‘faux pas’.


How to recover from a mistake:

  • Own it!  I forgot to change legs halfway whilst doing a lunge in one of my videos.  When I realised at the end, I just laughed about and told my fitness lot to 'do as I say' not 'do as I do'.
  • Apologise.  No need to go OTT, just a simple 'oh I'm sorry, I've made a mistake, I do apologise' will suffice.
  • Accept the consequences.  It's happened, you can't change it, so accept the impact and do whatever it takes to put things right.
  • Learn from it.  Was it an unfortunate one-off or is there potential for it to happen again?  Put a process in place to limit the chances of it happening again.  
  • Move on.  It's important to move on quickly, easier said than done I know, but there's no point in torturing yourself.  Do what you can to put things right and let it go.
How push through our invisible barriers:
  • All you need to do is ask yourself two questions - 
    • How will you feel tomorrow if you DON'T do this?
    • How will you feel tomorrow if you DO do this?


#2021

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