Have you ever caught yourself procrastinating?
“You should know better. You could do better. You should definitely achieve more — and live up to a much bigger potential. Why are you always your own worst enemy?!”
Your inner critic rails on you.
I know what it feels like, because I’ve experienced this too.
It’s been my biggest barrier to success.
As successful as I am, as many achievements as I’ve already had, I see a huge gap. Defined by wasted hours, procrastination, and simply not seizing opportunities that were mine for the taking.
The details don’t matter. Everything from distraction to addiction to avoidance to downright self-sabotage. The symptoms may differ, but the root cause is the same.
You are being your own worst enemy, standing in the way of your next big success.
I am being my own worst enemy, standing in the way of my next big success.
At this point, I’m not saying this to criticize myself.
I love myself, and understand that when I do this, it’s because I’m working through my own issues, my own head trash about work and wealth. (I’m not completely through it, but at least now I can accept my own so-called shortcomings with compassion.)
I’m saying this because if you feel this and resonate, I may be able to help you.
If you want success, wealth, and achievement — love yourself first…
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, founder of Hay House publishing. (If you’re not yet an Audible member, you get get the audiobook free with an Audible free trial.)
And while the book goes deep into things like affirmations, manifestations, and more, its core message is this: love yourself, and watch the negatives in your life disappear.
And there was one comment, in the middle of the book, that was almost a throwaway, that struck me.
She said that if you’re dealing with procrastination at work, the root cause may be that you do not feel that you are worthy of success. (Financial or otherwise.)
Let’s approach that from a slightly different angle.
If you do not feel that you’re worthy of wealth, it may show up in your day-to-day life like surfing the internet when you should be finishing a project, taking off early, showing up late, sleeping in, chatting with friends instead of work, or any of the other non-work activities that interfere with your work.
And the default approach to fix this is to get a better productivity system. To upgrade your planner, or your project management tool.
And while those things can cause surface improvements of the symptoms, Hay is right: you need to fix the underlying malady.
Flipping that: if you address your deep-seated feeling of unworthiness for success and wealth, procrastination disappears.
I know this, because I’ve done it. When I feel great about myself, all the things that I use as work-avoidance are suddenly completely unappealing.
Have you ever heard that many people are more afraid of success than failure?
I have. And while I believed it on some logical level, thinking about lost friends, and similar problems, I never truly understood it at this depth.
Many people — including me, at times — are afraid to be successful because it will force them to confront all this head trash about wealth.
If you feel that you are unworthy of wealth, and suddenly you have a financial windfall that you EARNED, you’re going to blow it up and lose it all. Because you don’t think you’re worth it.
But that’s not even the problem for most of us.
The problem for most of us is all the little things we do that hold us back.
We feel like we’re not worthy of wealth, or that wealth is for someone else. And so we don’t show up and do the little things every day that attract wealth to us.
We finish projects slower. We are “unintentionally” forgetful of important parts of the project that will contribute to a bigger success. We self-sabotage through things like procrastination and addiction.
The deeper problem is that we don’t love ourselves unconditionally…
We let our inner critic define what we think of ourself.
Be shame ourselves. We let the shaming scripts we picked up in childhood repeat endlessly in our minds.
We shame others who are successful, or shame the very idea of financial success itself, because it allows us to have these negative feelings without them being directed inward. (They feel righteous when we can project them outward, and better than the guilt of accepting their true nature which is self-attack.)
If you want to fix procrastination, you don’t do that by addressing procrastination.
You do it by addressing your deeper feeling of self-worth.
You fix yourself, and the world around you changes.
Until you do this, you’ll repeat patterns in your life that will create resistance against you achieving whatever wealth, success, or other good you want to attract in your life.
You have to love and accept yourself as you are…
You have to reprogram your beliefs about yourself, and finally treat yourself as being worthy of the success you seek…
You have to use your inherent value as a human being PLUS your daily actions to justify why you absolutely deserve wealth and success, as much as anybody else…
You have to treat yourself with care, compassion, kindness, understanding, forgiveness, and love, to open up to what you might call “blessings” that the world can offer to you.
And when you do that, you’ll start doing all those things you know you need to do. Your distractions will become far less attractive. And your productivity challenges will work themselves out.
You’ll be driven from within, to fulfill your potential. Not because you “should” but because you simply want to live your best life, because that’s what you want for yourself, just as you want everyone you love to live their best lives.
Most of us don’t do this. We’re tragically hard on ourselves. We put ourselves down, even as we’re happy to build others up. We are our own worst enemy — not because we have to be, not because it’s in our nature, but because we’ve chosen to be and then forgotten that we made this choice (often as a result of early programming from childhood).
Here’s your path to self-love and self-worth — and wealth and prosperity…
First, here’s an affirmation you can use. Say it to yourself a million times, and another million if you have to, until you believe it without question or condition:
“I deserve to have wealth and abundance, and I accept it now. I release the patterns in my consciousness that create resistance to my good life.”
And then, because you will benefit from having logic that backs up this fundamentally emotion-driven process, recognize this…
Wealth = Value * Reach.
Wealth is a byproduct of value creation. By creating more value for others — by helping them overcome their challenges and live the lives they want, you will make yourself attractive to wealth, success, and prosperity. That value is multiplied by the number of people whose lives you impact, and the product is wealth.
As a sentient being — as a human — you deserve to live a comfortable life full of an abundance of resources.
You are worthy of that wealth by right of birth, no matter who you are.
You fulfill your fundamental worth through the action of creating more value for more people. And the product of that creation is wealth.
It’s logical and practical, it’s spiritual and emotional. It’s all-encompassing.
We’re taught growing up that it’s not. We’re taught that we’re not worthy of wealth, or that wealth is only achieved through taking from others. And yet, wealth exists in great abundance and flows freely to those of us who consider ourselves worthy of receiving it.
And that flow is only accelerated when we take action consistent with our sense of self-worth, and remove the barriers that prevent the flow.
The question is: how will YOU declare yourself worthy of all this?
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
