Getting Past Your Mental Roadblocks to Success

Getting Past Your
Mental Roadblocks to Success

Is there something you need to do to get ahead in your personal life or business but have put off doing because it will involve an intense period of learning? The hardest part isn’t the learning—it’s getting past the mental hurdles you’ve put in your path to success!

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I’ve always been resistant to change, particularly if it involves any kind of new technology. I was still using an electric typewriter in the early 1980s, long after my peers had moved into the computer age. I was one of the last holdouts for a fax machine and, before 1998, vowed I would never communicate by email or waste my time surfing the Web, which I believed was the greatest time-waster ever to come down the pike. (Frankly, it still is if you don’t control yourself.)

It’s funny how things change if we give new ideas the slightest nudge and don’t let our preconceived and often false notions hold us back. In 1998, at the urging of a friend who gave me space on her website, I published my first articles online and began to do email and surf the internet using Web TV. That technology has evolved considerably since then by revolutionizing the way we consume video content today, but back then when I purchased a device, a keyboard, and a printer, I used a second small TV in the living room to write a book on my electronic typewriter based on email interviews with over a hundred art/craft business owners. That gave me the courage to buy my first DOS computer.

In 2000, when I was offered a large sum of money to be “a personality” on a new e-commerce site (Idea Forest), I had to knock down a whole set of mental roadblocks that had been holding me back from success as an author. All I had to do (simple to my new employer) was email my articles as MS Word attachments. Taking this job meant I had to move from my trusty old DOS computer to a new Windows-based system with a connection to the Internet. When my new computer system arrived, I resolutely dug in and didn’t come up for air for nine months. By December of 2000, I had not only done my job for the e-commerce site all year, but had tamed the “Windows beast” in the process, learned to use several new software programs, began to understand the power of the World Wide Web, and survived my first computer crash that had me doing everything all over again six months after I’d begun.

I hired someone to design a website for me in May of 2000, but after she vanished into thin air a few months later, I paid for some phone and email help and learned how to salvage and redesign the site using FrontPage software. If someone had told me then that this “computer dummy” would eventually learn how to design HTML-compliant websites from scratch, I would have thought them crazy.

Is Your Age Holding You Back?

I've always been open to learning new things, but somewhere in my mid-sixties I began to plant the message in my subconscious mind that I was getting too old to learn all I thought I would have to know to compete in the “Age of the Internet.” It took considerable willpower and a big change of attitude to move past the mental roadblocks I began to put into place as I got older.

I finally learned that age is merely one of the excuses people use to avoid doing what they need to do to realize a secret dream or achieve a particular goal they have set for themselves. Business beginners have a whole list of excuses for why they can’t get going in a business of their own, but many established business owners suffer from the same kind of mental roadblocks that must be overcome if they are to successfully move on in their career or business. Three of the most common excuses are:

“I’m scared because I don’t know how to do (whatever).”
“I don’t have enough money to do (whatever).”
“I don’t have enough time to learn all this stuff.”

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

The experience of forcing myself to move into the electronic age taught me that “feeling too old” to do this or that is merely a state of mind. Our brains don’t quit functioning as we get older; they simply respond to what we put into them. If we feed them such negative messages as, “It’s too late to do this; it’s too hard to learn; it costs too much; I don’t have time for this,” and so on, we will soon come to believe this mental teaching. On the other hand, if we plant encouraging messages in our subconscious mind, the whole picture begins to change.

If you can embrace the idea of change and are willing to leave your comfort zone, you can begin a new road of discovery today. Yes, you will experience extra stress, but it won’t hurt you if you accept it with a positive attitude. Look at yourself in a mirror and start telling yourself that change can be fun and exciting, that new things learned today could lead to surprising profits tomorrow, and that an investment in yourself is the best possible investment you can make in life.

If I can still figure out new ways to work and learn new technology at my advanced age, then you younger folks can too. All you have to do is put your mind to the task and step around the mental roadblocks in your way. Remember: It’s not the actual learning that’s hard—it’s getting past all those mental hurdles you’ve put in your path to success!

Related article: Harnessing the Power of Your Subconscious Mind

First published as a Brabec Real Life Bulletin on February 6, 2025.

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