Imagine this. You’ve worked really, really hard for years knocking on doors, making phone calls, and building your business from the ground up. You’ve made sacrifice after sacrifice, poured your heart and soul into your business, and literally shed blood, sweat, and tears to get to where you are today. Now you are finally reaping the rewards of your hard work.
Your dream, since childhood, has always been to buy a one-of-a-kind Lamborghini and you’re finally able to do so. It gets delivered to you with the utmost care and you can immediately picture yourself driving your beautiful, irreplaceable car into the sunset later that day. You’ve already vividly imagined your fingers gripping the steering wheel, the hum of the engine, and what the wind hitting your face on your first drive would feel like. This is the moment you’ve dreamed of since you were a child — the moment you get to drive YOUR dream car.
As you stand in your driveway, staring at your dream car, in disbelief, with tears of joy in your eyes, you turn, hand your keys to a shadowy figure and hop in the passenger seat to watch them experience the joy of driving your baby.
How would that feel?
Seems sort of ridiculous, right? Well, that Lamborghini is like your life, and too many of us are allowing other people to drive our priceless, rare lives, as we sit in the passenger seat and imagine what it would be like to drive it ourselves. Is this you? Who are you allowing you drive your life?
In the last couple of episodes of my Master Your Mission podcast, I’ve been talking about removing limiting beliefs — beliefs that hold you back from doing what you dream of doing — and pursuing your entrepreneurial purpose.
If you took some time to really consider your own limiting beliefs, you probably had some surprising moments where you realized that you’ve been moving through life with beliefs that were imprinted into your psyche by some external source — another person, your environment, your circumstances, and so on. It’s just like handing the keys to someone else to drive your irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind dream car.
You can take the keys back though. First, you have to acknowledge that someone else is driving your life by identifying what your limiting beliefs are. What thoughts do you have that keep you from moving forward with pursuing your dreams? What self doubts do you find playing over and over in your head?
Next, you have to identify how someone else got the keys to your life in the first place by identifying where those limiting beliefs came from. Did they come from your parents, did they come from friends, your environment, or your life experiences?
Finally, you can take the keys back and remove those limiting beliefs by finding a counter argument to them. Use examples of other people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish or think of other times in your life that you’ve been able to accomplish something that you first thought you couldn’t.
Be sure to refer back to the last two episodes of my podcast for a more in depth discussion on how to work through identifying and removing your limiting beliefs.
If you find that you’ve been handing the keys to your life over to other people, take them back today and be the driver. Go where YOU want to go and do the things that YOU want to do. You were meant to be a driver, not a passenger. Besides, you’ll look great with the winds of happiness blowing through your hair!