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What are brakes?
"There are no limits to what you can achieve except for the limits you placed on yourself.- Brian Tracy."
If you had ever driven a car or ridden a bike, you would probably understand what a brake does and how useful it could be during motion. When you apply a brake to a moving car, it reduces the speed and may bring it to rest depending on how hard you apply it.
A brake is a mechanical device that inhibits motion by absorbing energy from a moving system. It is used for slowing down or stopping a moving vehicle, wheel, axle, or to prevent its motion, most often accomplished utilizing friction. As a brake opposes motion by way of friction, so also, a brake can oppose success.
Any factor that reduces or slows down your success rate in acquiring wealth or making money can be seen as a brake to your successful life. There are lots of psychological characteristics that can act as predictors of success. Among which are:
Need for achievement: Human motivational attribute that can be explained as the desire for success or achieving something brilliant.
Person’s generalized belief over control of his or her destiny.
Another important psychological characteristic worthy of consideration is Self-efficacy. Brakes are serious opposition to making progress in life. You cannot be on brakes and expect the best speed in the race. It's just like applying brakes when your car is moving. The car will not move at its full speed when it's under brakes.
If you're willing to move fast and go far in life, you must at all instances remove anything (brake) that will impede your journey of success. Everyone has unwelcome thoughts from time to time. These unwelcome thoughts may limit your progress in life, may decrease your productivity efforts.
Henry Ford, the founder of Ford company was right when he said;
There is no man living that cannot do more than he thinks he can
How to Identify your brakes
Identifying your brakes is necessary for changes to take place in your life. It involves self-understanding and awareness in certain areas of your life. This must be done in other for a change to take place.
If you don't know about the existence of a problem, finding a solution to it may not be possible. So, the first step to finding a solution to a problem is to know about the existence of that problem and its nature. Identifying your brakes begins with having to realize that brakes are holding you back or slowing down your progress in life.
What are the brakes reducing your mental speed?
To be able to answer this question, you need to carry out some forms of self-analysis. This may involve asking yourself several questions. If you are very sincere with yourself, you may be wondered by the kind of things you will find about yourself.
Ask Questions.
Asking questions about yourself is a form of self-evaluation and analysis. It helps in the understanding of your personality without the aid of another person. Generally, self-analysis involves the investigation or exploration of one-self for better understanding personal thoughts, emotions, and behavior. This can be achieved by asking questions that are specifically designed to help you identify any mental blocks placed on your thinking capacity.
Examples of self-analytical questions that can be used include but are not limited to the following:
Do you feel like you don't spend enough time thinking about your personal development? Not spending enough time to think about yourself has negative consequences on your performance.
How often do you think about your personal development and growth?
Do you usually set goals for yourself? If yes, how often do you do that?
How do you think about yourself?
How is your self-esteem, are you holding yourself low or high? Your self-esteem defines your overall sense of personal worth or value. It also impacts your decision-making and motivates you.
What are the patterns of your thoughts?
Do you feel like you're inadequate or incapable (Imposter syndrome)? Individuals with imposter syndrome describe feeling like they are not smart enough or good enough. They feel like success is not possible and feel like past successes and hard work were only due to luck. As a result, they don't try out things because of these beliefs. It's a mental block, imposter syndrome is a brake to achieving greatness.
Procrastination? Procrastination can lead to anxiety, which in turn causes mental blocks.
Pay attention to yourself.
You can identify mental brakes by paying attention to your recurring thoughts and behavioral patterns. What words or phrases keep resonating? The feelings that come to the surface? Take note of those things that affect your confidence and prevent you from starting something new, focusing on the task at hand.
The best and fastest way to identify your brakes is to pay attention to your inner self.
Release your brakes
Have you ever driven your automobile with the brakes on? I want to believe that you have either had the experience yourself or have listened to someone's experience on that.
Driving your automobile with the brakes on is never a good best experience. It does not only limit its speed, but it also affects the automobile consumptions rate. That will result in creating much heat energy in the engine of the automobile that could eventually knock the engine. It's not healthy for the brake pads either.
The human body can be likened to your automobile with the brain acting as the engine of the body. Anything that suppresses how the brain functions will affect the success of that individual. It will cause lots of mental wear out and stress for such individuals too.
If the applied brakes are released, there will be a noticeable change in the speed of the automobile and a change in the sound of the engine. The same thing also happens to the human being if the mental brakes applied to him are released. He moves with a much better speed and finds things a little or lots easier compare to when the brakes are on.
You're capable of becoming everything you want but you have to get rid of any mental brakes holding you back. Your ability to identify these mental brakes and release them is essential to becoming what you are made of and what you want to become.
Most people are moving with mental luggage without realizing that. So, they are moving through life with these brakes partly set on without knowing anything about them. Of course, no one would deliberately want to slow his or her progress in life but you unintentionally and unknowingly do that by moving with these brakes on.
When you had gotten the ability to do something and that ability is not functioning as expected or flowing the way that you had wanted it to flow, you may end up "trying harder" with much effort just to make it work. Then when that extra effort put into the work and desire to make it work doesn't work the way you think it should, you may get frustrated with lots of questionings and doubts popping into your mind. What's wrong with me, why are things not working out for me, why me? This can be a lot frustrating and energy-consuming. The pain from this is second to none especially when the result you seek is not forthcoming.
This may be happening to you because you are pressing harder on the accelerator when you are on brakes. Release the brakes to get rid of the frustration, save your energy, live a successful life, make visible progress in all you do.
Release your brakes!!!
Clear off the unproductive thoughts holding you back.
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