How well do you know your own mind?

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giant red flags

find yourself skimming a certain section

outright deny the reality of a specific barrier

feel an increase in a positive or negative emotion surrounding it

start considering your own friends and colleagues who suffer from that barrier

etc.

Transference

How to Approach Transference:

Many will tell you to "pour out your cup" because it's full of nonsense and can't accept the truth until it's empty. I'm telling you to pour it out and shatter it. Then get ready to cast and fire your own new ceramic psychological framework, customized completely to position you for success based on you, not anyone else. Start completely over and formulate based on experience and not "advice."

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Dealing with Cerebration:

Practice meta-thinking and self-observation. Think about how you think. Watch how you think. Watch your body's reactions to your thoughts and see if they are appropriate (or lacking). You very well may be desensitized and can't muster excitement. If the idea of your wildest dreams come true only brings apathy instead of a rush of dopamine and serotonin, then you aren't feeling your wildest dream. You're intellectualizing it and safe-guarding yourself from taking the level of action required of you to achieve it. Don't think. Feel.

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Confronting Reaction Formation:

Perform exposure therapy upon oneself. Begin by imagining with your full being (not just cerebrally) what it would be like to succeed. Feel the fears and remind yourself that since it's all in your mind, it's completely safe although it feels absolutely real. Keep stretching this comfort zone. By the time you transition to the real world, you'll have disarmed this masked villain. You may have to keep beating him down over the years, but he'll never best you again.

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Conquering Your Mutually Exclusive Ideas:

Recognize the difference between your own thoughts and those imposed upon you by culture. Be willing to compartmentalize the You-you and the Them-you. Consider the difference betweens wants & needs, and how they both arise, and why someone might tell you one is different than the other (because they suffer from one of these psychological barriers). Your maturation will occur when you can take what you like and discard the rest from these two philosophies of yours and form your own guiding platform customized directly for yourself by yourself.



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Where We Want to Be Oriented:

The Now. Life is based on



​ The Now. Life is based on probabilities that you can influence only through taking action and exerting your magical influence upon the universe. To do this effectively, your mind needs to be rooted in the present with full awareness. If you struggle here, realize that the past and the future are literally imaginary. You only have access to right now and right here. Get into it fully, be the author, and play the role you want for yourself. Calmness is your goal, a calming of the surface of the emotional ocean inside you. Then it can reflect the true version of the present.

The Solution to Magical Thinking:

Don't. Don't release the pressure you're building up. You want it to explode. You want to snap. Quit trying to have what you haven't earned. Don't waste your internal resources. These maladaptive daydreams aren't motivating you or taking you closer to the goal. They are helping you stay right where you're at.



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How to Pass Through the Gate:

What gate? Quit psyching yourself out and get to work!



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Not doing what you should Doing what you shouldn't Doing the right things in the wrong order

Conquering Counter-Productivity:

Tomes have been written about this, and it all boils down to this. Have a clearly defined goal in achievable steps, do the most important thing first, block out distractions, and surround yourself with like-minded people with skill sets who can help you and hold you accountable.



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Upon entry into the world of business, one is often surprised that the majority of success-related books have less to do with how to operate a business and more with how to operate your own mind. While we are steadily concerned about the competition, those at the top of the mountain continually attempt to tell us thatAfter 15 years of entrepreneurship, reflecting upon the causes and consequences of the ups-and-downs, my daily activities, and my current situation, the truth of this statement has only become increasingly obvious. Having networked with people from the top of the industry down to the very bottom, all the while observing their behaviors and my own, I believe that the psychological barriers to success can be categorized neatly.However, being aware of them is far easier than conquering them. But to defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy intimately.As you read along, at some point,are going to pop up inside you. Maybe you'll:Any strong mental movement you experience is a sign post showing you one of the places you might be stuck. Pay close attention to your own reaction as you read along! In no particular order...One of the main areas that businessmen and women become stuck in is that of. Transference can take on many shapes and forms that block the individual from experiencing the reality of a business situation as it is.One of the main culprits is. Newbies tend to cast their own conceptual expectation over their undertakings. "If you build it, they will come." "Content is king." Those are a couple of traps that still ensnare even the experienced. Other's become deluded by the flat out lies of other wannabe's and guru's, with the expectation that they can build a mound of garbage instead of contributing to society and become wealthy with minimal effort. By copying the thoughts and behaviors of others, they've fallen into thetrap, in which they turn around and project someone else's beliefs as their own. This is the self-reinforcing black hole that followers get sucked into from which they'll never escape. Introjection will often lead to, the general "fake it till you make it" attitude that the rest of us recognize as "If you can't do, you teach" cop out. Pretty much any business guru is doing just this very thing and always ends up getting caught.When you fall intolike this, your vision of reality becomesby a veil of. You become assimilated by a false guru, by a web-ring of blogs, by forums, all regurgitating nonsense that appeals to your emotionality instead of the base reality of business. You become "incepted," having ideas that aren't your own implanted into your operating system, and you run those programs instead of ones you've developed for your own unique situation.To find success in business, you have to have the right motivations which cause you to act upon the right means at the right level of action. The only reason motivations will fire you up and push you through long hours of trudgery is becauseMany of us have the right reasons, but the massive action doesn't pour out of us. That's often because of, where instead of experiencing the energy pulse through us to the point where we realize it's our duty to succeed, we don't feel any energy at all. We intellectualize a virtual version of this feeling and emotion. Instead of becoming excited, wethe feeling of becoming excited.It's as if there's a firewall that converts bodily impulses into data-packets our mind's can deal with instead of our spirits. It drops off the surge of energy which might actually make you do something and delivers you the smallest, safest version. It's exactly like living in the Matrix. It's a virtual experience of a concrete reality.This is the entrepreneur's Achille's Heel. The Kill-Switch. The Woman in the Red Dress.. This will literally. It also has many faces, and when you recognize one, it will put on a different mask.What happens with Reaction Formation is that you peer into the future at your end-goal and realize all of the trauma, energy, and time it will take, and so you not only do the exact opposite, but you do it in such a fierce way that it ensures you'll never have to confront the efforts to reach the goal ever.The first mask is that of the. This type ofis rooted in the inability to emotionally navigate the troughs of life. Instead of performing a rational analysis on risk and mitigating it to ensure success, a man will simply not take risk at all. His fear of sliding into another trough in the rollercoaster of business has doomed him to always remaining in the trough by not leveraging his current assets to build more.The next two masks that are similar, the first of which is the. The Fear of Gain is rooted in aand a self-concept based on an external locus of control, such as luck, fate, destiny, a god, the illuminati, etc. "People are positioned to be powerful. Us regular folk don't have class-mobility. Thing'll never change for me." Sadly, every time opportunity comes knocking, a person with these thoughts will tend to commit. You know just about every lottery winner is broke by the next year? Guess which type of people buy lottery tickets as a pressure-release valve and consequentially end up winning?The previous mask looks a lot like thetoo. It can lead a person to commit self-sabotage as well, but less deliberately. A businessman dealing with this mask is at least in the game, but may not move forward ever. We've all seen this type of entrepreneur (myself included as related to the next major barrier), who should have already been successful several times over. As related to the Fear of Responsibility, a person may have a destructive self-image (imposed by oneself) and a negative self-esteem (imposed by early social and familial relations). Not only do they feelto receive such blessings, but if it's thrusted upon them, they may feel like an, as if they are tricking those around them into believing they are a success when the opposite is true. This can lead to a purposefulthat helps them escape the fear (and also the success). This is abackwards on the bridge to success, back to the safe cliffside.One more way people combat the fear of responsibility is by being "secret entrepreneurs" so they don't have to impress anyone or answer to other people's expectations. The problem here is that thisremoves any reward based on social comparison or providing for those you care about. It also causes you to try to become a superman who does it all himself (not a scalable operation). This is a strange kind of engaged. We can't make it alone.This termrefers to having your cake and eating it too. It revolves around having more than one fundamental philosophy fighting for domination within one's being.A great example is these Silicon Valley companies having "meditation hour" and bringing in Buddhist monks to give lectures on mindfulness. The employees are also going to learn about the causes and solutions of suffering. Now you've got an ambitious entrepreneur who believes his ambition is precisely the cause of his problems.Take a Buddhist, a Hippy, a Socialist, or a programmed Peasant who thinks there might be more to life and that financial success is the key, and it's like watching a self-emergent A.I. arise within a computer running the "Culture 2.0" operating system.The key symptoms of a sufferer of this barrier is the classic:Another interesting "firewall" our mind's can install is that of. This is when an intrapsychic conflict such as { I want money | money is the root of all evil } results in a psychosomatic manifestation. How many people do you know always end up becoming sick right when opportunity knocks (and they aren't faking it)? Some people are constantly falling ill all year round with no medical explanation. Conversion temporarily removes this conflict by transmuting it into something more powerful that demands immediate attention, thus delaying choice making and action.We all generally fall near one of the poles of this continuum, but those at the near extremes suffer from this psychological barrier to success.refers to a general focus on either the past or the future. It's a lot like introversion and extraversion.Those who orient themselves in the direction of the past tend to deal with depression, regret, reminiscence, recurrent dreams, and make a lot of excuses based on experience. To the individual, the past represents the entirety of life and existence, so it's natural to attempt to form order out of that chaos and pick out patterns. It's also natural to focus on the times we were let down, failed, hurt, etc.sets up an expectancy of pain and suffering, leading to a loss of meaning and therefore action., on the other hand, is nervousness due to always anticipating what the future may bring. Hopefulness can still survive in this orientation, but a fear of the unknown leaves the door open for negatives to oppress the mind. This thought-style leads to anxiety, panic attacks, over-thinking, obsessiveness, and crippling phobias. It also causes a de-emphasis on positively confirmational experiences from the past that would quell the anxiety if only the person could turn around for a moment.This is a tricky one because clearly, as we've been discussing, our thoughts create our reality. And the fact that anything exists at all is pretty magical, and quantum physics, and spiritual powers, and aliens!See how quicklycan devolve into distraction and offer short-cuts that don't seem to exist? Wouldn't we all love a shortcut? This is why this one is so tricky, because the further down the rabbit-hole you go, the more sensible it seems (except from the outside, where you look like a complete nut).Let's not deal with the classical version of magical thinking too much, other than to point out, which is essentially the desire for us to all receive without giving. Any type of thinking that tells you that you can get without earning is bologna. The Law of Attraction, Tapping for Success, Witchcraft Spells, Bitcoin Mining (j/k), Blackhat Spam... don't get trapped by anything that tells you effort is not a requirement.The form of magical thinking most of us deal with is that of. It doesn't seem harmful, but what happens is you release all of the energy stored for action by faking out your mind that you've achieved the result already. Imagine you want to punch someone in the face, so you start screaming and cussing at them, and then you feel better and no longer need to punch them. It's just like that, but now you don't need to work, because you've just created a substitute action that provided a similar emotional result. Your mind doesn't know the difference between you driving a Lamborghini around versus you pretending to do it.I was tempted to call these, because that's what they are in the physical realm of business. Their psychological correlate are. These barriers are exactly that, they are barricades, blockades, hurdles, insurmountable mountains standing right in your path. @Tavin mentions this phenomenon, where something seems downright impossible until you achieve it. Then suddenly you're achieving all of the time with much less effort and concern for the difficulty.The reason is, is because from your distance on the path, you see the fierce, menacing Guardians at the Threshold. They demand your energy, time, effort, blood, tears, and possibly even your success. So you keep your distance. But finally you go for it. You hike up your skirt and start marching along determined. And when you get to that scary gate...There was no gate. There were no guardians. It was all an illusion. This is the Gateless Gate. It wasn't ahead of you, but was always all around you. You'll never pass through it, because you've always been on the otherside while standing right in the midst of the gate posts.And finally, the barrier that gets us all from time to time. You may have developed yourself to the point where you've torn the veil and see the reality of the business landscape clearly. But working hard, smart, and long hours still requires a colossal will-power, and will-power is not an infinite source. It is renewable though, so the trick is managing the expenditure.There are lots of ways we areto our goals. @CCarter constantly exposes people's own counter-productivity to themselves any time he catches them bitching. It's tricky because a lot of times we aren't self-aware of our various methods of procrastination.in itself is a form ofto the concept of work. It generally arises in one of three ways:Another way we are counter-productive is through substituting orbiting activities that seem like work. We all know the guys who do nothing but press refresh on forums, comment on all of the new industry blog posts, and are always on the social networks talking about doing instead of doing. This is called. Don't pretend to be busy to avoid being busy.One of the most frequently observed methods of being counter-productive we see on online forums is that of. It's similar to Isolation and the Fear of Responsibility. "Wait a second. If I'm constantly posting about what I'm doing, I can be held accountable..." This is why case studies are abandoned, why members suddenly disappear from the community, and why people lurk instead of engage.The saddest barrier to see is. It's often the most-capable entrepreneurs that will justify why they either shouldn't bother or won't ever make it. They performof themselves against people in completely different lifestyles and career paths and use that as an excuse to be a forlorn little bitch. Remember, entrepreneurs cram a 40 year long career into 5 or 10, mostly with delayed gratification. Of course you aren't earning the same amount as the guy collecting weekly paychecks. He also can only go to the potty when his master says so.There are undoubtedly more psychological barriers to success that haven't popped out at me. They say that anything negative you notice is your own Shadow, your own red flags and blockages. If you deal with anything that I didn't list, please share it with us. And definitely offer any insight you can concerning the barriers above so we can all benefit and grow from it.