Common personal finance and career advice is to work toward an annual raise, stay ahead of inflation, and live happily ever after.
But this perfect personal finance picture almost never plays out in this idyllic way. You wake up one day and realize that you’re stuck.
- Perhaps you want to change your career. But you’ve been saying that year after year, and it just never feels like the ‘right’ time. (Spoiler alert: It never will be!)
- Or maybe a health crisis you didn’t plan for (or a condition you’ve never even heard of) suddenly rears its ugly head at you. It’s forcing you to change how you work and live, now, and so far it ain’t pretty.
- Then there’s the less-pressing-but-still-urgent scenario: You just hate getting out of bed in the morning. You realize you can’t keep living life this way for decades to come.
We’re told to comply in order to build wealth slowly and methodically. But when you get energized and remove the big rocks that stand between you and wealth, you start moving far faster than ever before.
I know this because it happened to me. I spent a decade practicing law, thinking I had to do it forever to overcome law school debt and “make it”. But I wasn’t in my sweet spot — and I was miserable.
Once I got aligned with my intuition and moved into coaching — which involved the very scary step of leaving an active practice — my income quickly matched and then surpassed what I was making as a lawyer.
Could I have foreseen this in my legal days? Not at all.
It’s because my one obstacle — tapping into my intuition — was not available to me at the time. Once I discovered that, everything changed dramatically.
Identifying your one obstacle
The obstacle is the way. When you’re able to identify your one obstacle, you have action steps that you can start taking right away.
It’s easy to shrug off this step, especially if you’re someone at the top of your game or a high performer. It seems so straightforward and obvious.
Spending time with this approach and sitting deeply with what stops you can be powerful.
Often, the transformation that takes place from reforming one area of your life ends up spilling into other areas of life too.
Overcoming this one obstacle is simple. However, what’s important to remember is that simple does not mean easy. We often confuse the two!
How to identify your one obstacle
You might already have a good gut sense of what your one obstacle is.
If you don’t though, here are a few questions I like to have my clients ask themselves to help identify what is happening and the circumstances.
“What are the areas of life you think about or analyze a lot?”
Analysis without action is a red flag. When we want something, we take actions to obtain it. So it’s good to take your magnifying glass and really tell the truth about areas of life in which you analyze or forecast day in and day out, but don’t make a move on.
Which areas of my life am I thinking about critically each and every day?
Analysis is similar to criticism, but not the same.
What things, which are out of my control, do I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about?
Control blocks intuition and lays groundwork for overthinking. To put it another way, where are you overthinking in life?
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A financial breakthrough moment is dead ahead of you; it’s time for you to identify what stands in the way and move past it powerfully.