Realising your dreams can be a long, undulating path to success and it’s normal to experience challenges or even failure along the way.  However, the key is to not let these challenges hold you back.

Establishing my Life Coaching business was no different.  The initial dream of being a Life Coach seemed the perfect use of the skills that I developed during my military career.  Motivating people, building their personal confidence, inspiring them to have endless levels of positivity and improving their Health & Fitness, was my bread and butter (https://www.oaxlifecoaching.com/courses/).  However, I never imagined just how much of a rollercoaster it would be!

Things that may hold you back:

Fear of failure.  Nobody likes failure.  It makes you feel rubbish, but if you don’t try you will never know!  Always try to think about what’s the worst that can happen.  Don’t fear making mistakes because it will make you apprehensive and hold you back.  Fear not trying in life!

Listening to those negative voices.  We all have that annoying negative chimp on our shoulder telling you that you’re not good enough, or that you can’t do something.  These voices knock your self confidence and will hold you back.  Get rid of phrases such as “I can’t” or “I should”.  Replace them with “I can” or “I will”.

Strive for perfection.  No matter how hard you try you’re never going to be perfect.  Continually striving for perfection will hold you back from reaching your goals and make you flipping miserable along with it.

Knock backs.  In almost every challenge that you face in life you will experience knock backs.  Have the tenacity and resilience to keep on going in pursuit of your goal and dream.  “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”, Confucius.

Your past haunting you.  Just because something happened in the past, doesn’t mean it will happen to you again.  We all make mistakes.  Just make sure you learn from them and don’t repeat them.  Don’t let your past hold you back from achieving something great.

A couple of the above affected me at some point when I was establishing my business.  In particular the fear of failure caused self doubt to creep into my mind.  The negative chimp would be on my shoulder laughing at me!  Registering a company, insurance, social media and marketing were just some of the things I had to learn very quickly and to be honest they didn’t come naturally to me.  Trying to sell my product, essentially me, was a huge challenge and one that I really wasn’t comfortable with.

The last 2 years have been a very steep learning curve and the business continues to throw challenges at me every single day.  I deal with them and move on.

Would I change anything?  Absolutely not!  The challenges I’ve faced have made me become the Coach I am today.

Never let anything hold you back from achieving your dreams!

Make the change

Chris