How might you be holding yourself back from greater success?
Gay Hendricks offers a provocative possibility in his book The Big Leap, which is that each of us has an Upper Limit of how much success or joy or abundance we can tolerate. That Upper Limit is wired into us by our early experiences, perhaps because we feel flawed, or that our success will mean being disloyal to our family or outshine them. When we hit that Upper Limit, we do something to sabotage ourselves to stop our progress.
This may seem counterintuitive, as we may point to the other people who are causing our setbacks. But in his decades of coaching, Hendricks observed that those setbacks consistently occurred at the moments of greatest success in people’s lives, and discovered the Upper Limit Problem in observing the ways they were creating those setbacks themselves.
To avoid the Upper Limit setbacks means taking 100% responsibility for our own actions and results. Rather than worry about things we can’t control, or blame or criticize others for impeding us, or argue with friends or partners, we focus on our own behavior to instead take positive action to exit our “Zone of Competence or Excellence”, where we are merely good at what we do, to live into our “Zone of Genius”, where we do what we love and have the greatest impact.
This may sound hokey, but Hendricks’s book aligned with my own experience in many insightful ways. I appreciated his perspective, and if this overview sounds interesting, check out my longer summary with quotes and examples at https://lnkd.in/gcDU8uYg