8 Things to Stop Doing Right Now

from www.pluginid.com

The main purpose of this site is to help you be who you want to be and live the life you want to live. I think everyone deserves that at the bare minimum, and I believe that everyone can achieve it. Therefore, a lot of the messages that I share here are positive, inspiring and action orientated.

With this post I want to change direction, and not cover the things you should be doing, but the things you shouldn’t be doing. I’m not even going to be half-hearted about it and say you should ‘probably’ stop doing these things or ‘you can if you want’. No; you really should stop, right now.

I truly believe that successful implementation, or actually ‘de-implementation’ of these methods will dramatically improve a number of things. The first thing that will change is your overall level of happiness, the second thing that will develop is a laser-like focus for your goals and the third thing that will change is going to be your overall awareness.

What I mean by improving your awareness is that you actually might ‘wake up’ to some of the things you’ve been doing, and understand exactly why I say you need to stop doing these things immediately.

1. Doubting Yourself - If you think that you can’t achieve something then I have some good news for you, you’re probably right. Doubts and lack of self belief are the number one way to not only fail to achieve your goals, but to prevent yourself for even trying to go for them in the first place.

Ask yourself, is there anyone in this world that could achieve what I want to achieve? If so, then you definitely can as well.

2. Looking for Answers - I don’t mean this as a sort of umbrella phrase that covers every situation in the world, sometimes we need answers. On occasion we need to know why things happened and how we can change them, but a lot of the answers we look for won’t change anything even if we get them.

“Why do some people have all the luck?”
“Why was I born into this environment?”
“Why am I not smart / pretty / cool / rich?”
These are all questions that deserve no time to be pondered. Don’t look for answers, just start creating results.

3. Procrastinating - This is something I struggled with for a long time, but regular readers of the site will know that I ‘cured’ this quite well. Basically, I make sure I know what I want in life, and any time I catch myself procrastinating or wishing I didn’t have to do a certain ask, I simply ask myself: “Do you really want this?”

Has there ever been a time when procrastinating actually served you well? Did those extra 20 minutes on Facebook or a call to your friend really help the situation? The ‘problem’ is still going to be there, so just deal with it now.

4. Blaming Someone Else - It’s far easier and more likely for us to blame someone else for our current situation rather than take responsibility ourselves. “I’m poor because John makes bad financial decisions” or “I’m unhappy because Sarah left me”.

You have to take full and total responsibility for yourself and all of your actions. Sure, there will be people who want to help you and people involved in what you do, but you are completely responsible for the outcome. If you keep looking to others as the reason for your ‘failures’ without picking up the pieces yourself, these ‘failures’ will continue to happen.

5. Judging Others - First of all, you have absolutely nothing to gain but everything to lose from judging someone. People that others would instantly judge as ‘uncool’ or ‘boring’ have turned out to be some of the most awesome people I’ve ever met in my life.

Secondly, I want to make it clear that I’m not just saying this because it is nice and should be included on a list like this; I fully believe it and try to implement it into my life. If you are going to judge people, at least judge them by their actions, and not their appearance or their background.

6. Waiting to Live - I think most of you will relate to this point more than any. I should know, I’ve spent a good few years of my life waiting for things to happen before life will be perfect and I can start enjoying it. As soon as I finish college, as soon as I’m making enough money online, as soon as I’ve gained X amount of lbs and I’m ripped etc., these are all useless thoughts that I’ve had.

You know what, these things may come, and you may get to finish college or get to your dream weight. As soon as you get there though, you’ll realise you’ve just wasted and forgotten the whole journey it took to arrive at the spot. The time to enjoy life is right now, no matter what situation you are in or what you hope the future may hold.

7. Needing Reasons to Be Happy - 2 weeks ago I wrote something that touched upon this idea in one of my blog posts:

I have a huge grin on my face as I’m writing this; in fact I’ve had one for the last few days. Should I tell you why? OK, well…there is absolutely no reason. What reason do you need to feel great, why not just feel great?
I’m feeling like that on a very regular basis these days. We often feel we need things to ‘happen’ to give ourselves permission to be happy. Yet, when you think about it, how ridiculous is that? At any moment in time, you can have complete control over how you feel. Don’t look for reasons to feel good and smile, you’re alive, that should be enough.

8. Caring What People Think - I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t easy, and I don’t think it’s going to come instantly unless you have some drugs or alcohol available. I have no doubt that this step takes time, but you can begin to care less and less with practice.

“What people say about you is none of your business”

- Sean Stephenson
I’ve wrote a lengthy blog post on the subject that I recommend you check out. The main point from that post I want to highlight is that you should just really put life into perspective. This is the only opportunity we have, are we really going to spend our time worrying about what people think of us, something we can’t even change anyway?

I would love to hear your thoughts, what other things do you think we should stop doing right now?