How To Get Over Mental Barriers | Create The Life You Want

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Barriers come in many forms, but learning how to get over mental barriers is the worst. Mental barriers come with that inner voice that tells you what to do or not to do and they can hard to recognize and hardest to overcome. In the Goal Setting and Tracking Series, I talked about the categories of barriers and how to identify barriers that may stop or delay your goals. What happens when you come across a mental barrier?

What do you do when you are frozen in fear of overdoing that next step? 

You thought that the barrier was ‘lack of knowledge’ or ‘lack of time’ or just some other reason.

So you did the research and created time to tackle that project, but you still couldn’t take the next step.

Now what?!

Identifying the Mental Barrier

That feeling, the one that threw up a wall of “Girl, I’m not going there!” attitude. That is the mental barrier. When you feel that, you’ve hit the royal jackpot of self-reflection signals that are screaming at you to dig further. 

Why are you feeling that way?

What could be causing this feeling? 

Sometimes it isn’t easy to identify right away. It may take a little while to dig through the chaos of your feelings to put that puzzle together. This process of working through it is so important.  The self-discovery of what you figure out about yourself is empowering for your journey.

Use a journal if that helps you. Document each thought or feeling to sort through it. Talk to a friend or even a trusted professional to help you through this time in your life.

I don’t want you to minimize this process for figuring out the barrier. This step is so important for you to recognize what is stopping you from creating the life you want. I want to caution you though. Don’t just throw a name on it and run to the next step of trying to fix it.

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Pause Before Creating a Plan

As high achievers, it is so easy to move to a solution immediately after figuring out the problem. I want you to hold off for a moment or two before tackling a mental barrier.

Press pause for now.

Mental barriers are usually huge barriers that will be emotionally challenging and will take a considerable amount of energy to overcome. You need to be ready to go through that.

To be able to overcome these mental barriers you will need to take this time to acknowledge why you have this mental barrier. Accept that you subconsciously believed it for so long and forgive yourself for not recognizing it sooner. Finally, you need to prepare yourself emotionally and mentally for the journey ahead.

If you run directly into this journey without taking this time to prepare yourself then it will be harder to move forward. You may find that you aren’t ready to do it now and the emotional journey you face will be harder to accept.

A Barrier I Couldn’t Ignore Anymore

This happened to me just this week. It was International Women’s Day last week and I had planned to write about gender balance at home, and gender balance at work. These were planned weeks ago and knew in my gut I was dreading writing them but felt the message needed to be said.

I couldn’t write about it though. I was completely frozen. The words wouldn’t come to me at the computer but kept me up at night while trying to sleep.

Tossing and turning every night and yet struggling to sit and write something was so frustrating. I turned to my online support group of amazing ladies. They gave me ideas for a title on the first one and then encouraged me to hit publish on the second, all the while telling me how excited they were to read them.

I pushed past the fear and wrote them, but still wondered why it was so hard to do it.

Then two things happened and I don’t believe in coincidences!

The first was starting the book, You are a Badass by Jen Sincero. In her first chapter, she talks about how the subconscious mind is actually in control even though your conscious mind believes it is.

So if you set goals but are struggling it probably has something to do with something the subconscious mind is telling you.

The second was reading an article written by Tammy from One-day, Let’s talk about the F-word. The F-word is feminism. I had always thought of feminism in a negative light (sorry Tammy!). I mean I believe that everyone deserves equality. Everyone does! I just wasn’t a sign-holding-marching-to-protest-or-being-in-your-face-kind-of-feminist.

So why did I not want to be called a feminist? 

I realized when reading Tammy’s enlightening words that my subconscious mind had thrown up a mental barrier when it came to feminism and being willing to out myself as one to the world. Silly right?

Sort of but here’s why it became a mental barrier for me. Small moments in my life had subconsciously told me to be small. To conform to social expectations.

There were specific defining moments of my childhood and adult life that made me feel safer being small. Moments that told my subconscious mind that being a girl needed to conform to social expectations.

Looking At My Past

I was once passionate about drawing, but being criticized for my “lack of talent” stopped me from pursuing that art form. It even blocked my choice of engineering field. Live smaller.

I had a teacher segregate the class from smart and normal students. I was on the normal student side but yet some of the kids on the smart side asked for my help in class. My grades naturally reflected my status in class that year. Live smaller. Conform.

A group of popular girls in school were sexually abused by a group of boys. The message to me was to not be unique or pretty. I needed to watch how I act around boys because I may put myself in a bad situation. Live smaller. Conform.

I was intrigued by cars and mechanics growing up but told that girls can’t take those classes. They won’t be practical for a girl. Live smaller. Conform.

 

Fighting for More

I didn’t always comply and found ways to consciously fight against those beliefs. There were small ways that I fought this conformity. When I was a small girl I was told that I shouldn’t call myself Jackie, because that was a boy’s name. So I changed the spelling of my name to Jacquie. It’s still short for my given name but it wasn’t a “boy’s name”.

In 1989, was encouraged to change my plan of becoming an engineer when the Montreal Massacre shook Canada. 14 women in an Engineering classroom were segregated and shot because they were women. I went against my subconscious mind and the wishes of parents and teachers and took Engineering, ultimately earning that degree.

I have been taking the time to think through this mental barrier and I’ve realized that I haven’t always let myself be small. When I saw a path to overcome something or achieve something I jumped in because the path was clear to me. If the path was clear and I could see success then I found it easier to fight my inner dialogue to stay small.

When the path isn’t clear or when I’m challenged to grow along my journey this is where my inner dialogue wins. It is then easier to let myself live small than to push through.

I’ve had this mental barrier my entire life. It’s not new. Sometimes I’ve beat it, and sometimes I’ve needed friends to help me beat it. Other times it won. It kept coming back though. This week I realized what it was and gave it a name. That is huge progress! 

Immediately, I wanted to rush in a find all the ways to finally overcome this barrier and give myself freedom once and for all. I’m not going to though. This mental barrier is going to be the mother of all barriers to overcome.

It deserves enough respect and a moment (or two) to remember how it felt in that moment of enlightenment. That moment of clarity.

How to Get Over Mental Barriers

There are a few simple steps to mental barriers that work:

1. Self-reflection – taking the time to learn why you might be feeling a certain way. This gets easier the more you intentionally work towards improving life for you.
2. Identify the barrier – give it a name so it can’t be mysterious any longer. Take your power back!
3. Take a Moment – let your mind process this moment so you can celebrate this breakthrough. You worked hard to recognize this mental barrier and deserve to feel good about that moment of clarity.
4. Find ways to break the mental barrier – this will be like breaking a bad habit. The pathways in the brain are pretty deep but now that you’ve named the barrier you will be able to get out of the rut and move forward.

Create a journal entry to mark this occasion or even use a page in The Ultimate Life Goal Journal to track your progress on this mental barrier. This is a huge step in creating the life you want. When you are able to take those moments to let the moment of clarity sink in you will be able to remember that feeling when things get hard and you want to give up. Don’t give up! Just remember this moment and the feeling you had.

What mental barrier are you struggling with right now? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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