Welcome back to our series on the 7 Rules that LEGENDS live by:
Learn Yourself, Exercise Aggressively, Grow Tribes, Express Passion, Navigate Confidently, Destroy Limitations, Share Treasure.
Limitations are a fact of life. But confronting and breaking through them is what allows us to elevate ourselves to a higher level.
There are limitations that are inside of you, and limitations that exist outside of you. It takes a tremendous amount of learning yourself and being mindful and conscious of yourself to begin the process of destroying limitations, but the easiest way to start is to look around your environment and take an assessment. Where does pessimism exist that’s holding you back? What does your situation look like with your friends? Are you constantly going out and getting hammered? Are you doing things that keep you from your explosive growth and your opportunity? If that’s the case, then start to politely decline going on those sorts of binge situations or engaging in those type of scenarios. In order to crush your limitations and evolve beyond them, you need to examine your circle of friends, confront your limiting behaviors, and embrace the growing pains.
The Circle of Five
You are the average of the five people closest to you. And if the five people closest to you are holding you back, then you need to replace them with five people who are pulling you up. It may sound harsh and you may lose some friends in the process, but we only have a short time on this Earth today, so you may as well do what it takes to continually progress and move in a direction that you can express your passions. Destroying external limitations, and eliminating those obstacles from your life is key to that.
But don’t misunderstand; If you find you need to make some changes in your social circle, surrounding yourself with yes-men isn’t the answer to your problem. As discussed in Business Insider’s “You’re The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” author Aimee Groth lays out the idea of ensuring that your group includes those who are honest and critical of you and your actions;
“While it’s ideal to be closely surrounded by positive, supportive people who want you to succeed, it’s also necessary to have your critics. According to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research, ‘Tell Me What I Did Wrong: Experts Seek And Respond To Negative Feedback,’ novices have a preference for positive feedback, but experts want negative feedback, so that they can make progress.”
Think about it this way; we’ve discussed the importance of exercising, and in that vein of logic we know that muscles can’t grow if they aren’t being pushed and forced to get stronger. No one would look at dumbbells and say, “That’s a negative stimulus, we should cut it out of our workouts.” Instead, those dumbbells are viewed as valuable tools in shaping and strengthening our bodies.
Our minds function in much the same way. Elite Daily explains in their 2016 piece “You Are The Sum Of The 5 People Closest To You, Make It Count” that;
“If you’re surrounding yourself with people who never ask you tough, thought-provoking questions, you’ll never be living up to your full potential to conceptualize those answers. That’s not to say every conversation has to be about politics or existentialism, but if you only hang with you current besties because it’s convenient while ‘Monday Night Football’ is on, it might be time to consider whether you’re getting enough intellectual stimulation out of those interactions. Seek out those who provoke slightly uncomfortable thoughts and challenge your mind; don’t take verbal sparring and mutual intellectual admiration for granted.”
Confront Yourself
The more difficult aspect of this process may be destroying your internal limitations — Those self-limiting beliefs that are sabotaging your success, that are causing you to continually be stuck in a situation that is making you unhappy, or that are causing you pain and suffering. This is a great opportunity to look inside yourself and be honest; Recognize that maybe these actions and emotions aren’t the best behaviors, methods, places, or environments for you to be in. This can be a really painful aspect of your self-audit, but that pain provides a great opportunity to move forward and really find happiness. The lower you fall, the higher you fly. So if you go through these periods of time where you’re going through some misery or turmoil, it’s a really great opportunity for you to embrace the pain and power through. Don’t sit there and suffer — Instead recognize it, move through it, and then climb out of it afterwards.
Lean Into The Pain
It’s human nature to want to avoid feeling pain; Who actually wants to hurt or feel uncomfortable? But in the full palette of life, we can’t avoid pain and turmoil completely. So how can we, in our pursuit of a better self, utilize pain to grow and move to a higher level in life?
In The Conversation’s 2015 piece entitled “In Pursuit of Happiness: Why Some Pain Helps Us Feel Pleasure,” author Brock Bastian posits that;
“People are constantly seeking new ways to clear their minds and connect with their immediate experiences. Just think of the popularity of mindfulness and meditation exercises, both of which aim to bring us in touch with our direct experience of the world. There is good reason to believe pain may be effective in achieving this same goal. Why? Because pain captures our attention.
Imagine dropping a large book on your toe mid conversation. Would you finish the conversation or attend to your toe? Pain drags us into the moment and after pain we are more alert and attuned to our sensory environment — less caught up in our thoughts about yesterday or tomorrow.
My colleagues and I recently tested whether this effect of pain may also have some benefits. We asked people to eat a Tim Tam chocolate biscuit after holding their hand in a bucket of ice-cold water for as long as they could. We found that people who experienced pain before eating the Tim Tam enjoyed it more than those who did not have pain.
In two follow-up studies, we showed that pain increases the intensity of a range of different tastes and reduces people’s threshold for detecting different flavors. One reason people enjoyed the Tim Tam more after pain was because it actually tasted better — the flavor they experienced was more intense and they were more sensitive to it… Pain literally brings us in touch with our immediate sensory experience of the world, allowing for the possibility that pleasures can become more pleasant and more intense.”
The simple fact is that your pain in this moment — the discomfort and unstable uncertainty that you’re feeling and trying to run from — is actually the key to unlocking a higher level of happiness. Embrace the pain and keep moving forward straight through it and to the happiness on the other side. Limitations exist all around us, and within us; your job is to find which limitations are real true immovable obstacles, and which are paper mache waiting to be crushed. The fear of limitation is what holds the average person back from taking a risk and striking out onto their own; but you’re not the average person. You know that destroying your limitations leads to new levels of success for you and your business.
Have you read the other rules that legends live by? Get caught up here:
Rule II — Exercise Aggresively
To learn more or reach out to Nate, visit www.natelind.com
