Someone Tell Me What My Point Was....?

Fear of failure and fear of success may be very different things that originate from different experiences or old wounds, but they both get you to the same place. It's a little place called nowhere, and it's located right along the banks of a river called de-nile. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? Either you ARE that person, or you know that person. The one who just can't seem to get the hell out of their own way. They've got the best intentions, they talk big, they make plans, they really believe they're going to do what they are setting out to do- BUT THEN, when it comes time to do some actual work, and make progress they abruptly abandon the whole thing.

I've done it, you've done it, we're all guilty, but most people don't live their whole lives this way. The problem with being like this is that the more you give into the fear the more comfortable you get living in that nowhere place where you go day to day doing the bare minimum to get by and stay comfortably under the radar. If you don't try you can't fail, and if you don't succeed and show people that you are capable of more they will never expect more from you. The problem is if you never fail then you never learn the lessons that come along with failing, and you don't develop that thick skin that you need to survive. If you never try so that you never succeed then you never get to see what you're really capable of, and you may even start to believe that you're not capable, or deserving, of more.

How do you fix this? How do you get someone to see past their own fear?

I can't answer either of these questions because I'm just as guilty of being afraid as anyone else. Maybe that's hard to believe if you know me, but it's absolutely true. In my case it's a fear of failure, and it stems from undiagnosed ADHD and a mood disorder (or two). It's a long story that we don't need to rehash, but in the end it equals out to me having absolutely no confidence WHATSOEVER in my academic abilities. I suffered through high school, I bailed out on college, blah blah blah...

I'm starting to bore myself.

The whole point of this is that these problems are a very large part of why people struggle so much with weight loss challenges. Luckily my crap is pretty confined to the areas of intelligence and higher education, so I haven't run into a lot of mental blocks when it comes to the challenge, but other people have and I'm searching for solutions. Words of encouragement. Been there and done that stories. You know... Because even though I have begun to work on my issues, I'm 29 years old and I've only just been evaluated and diagnosed with pretty severe ADHD a couple of months ago. Clearly I'm a little behind on this one.

How do you help someone to stop repeatedly tripping over the same pile of useless bullshit? It's difficult to watch someone you care about repeatedly make the same mistake, repeatedly spinning in the same circle, repeatedly torpedoing their own chances.... repeatedly....ah crap.

You know what the hell I mean.

It's frustrating because while I really want to help I know that anything anyone says to me in an attempt to convince me that I'm not a total buffoon pretty much falls on deaf ears.

So maybe I just answered my own question. Maybe we all have to figure it out for ourselves.

I still don't think this is going to stop me from delivering the occasional motivational speech, or bitchy verbal ass kicking. We all have to find joy wherever we can, and the ability to speak my mind with little thought to how it's going to be perceived by others is pretty joyful.

You're going to have to toughen up if you're going to make it. This much, I think, we can all agree is true.