⚠️DISCLAIMER: Don’t try this at home kids – you could seriously injure yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing. 🤕
What’s currently holding YOU back from achieving your goals?
To achieve our full potential we must first break through our self-imposed barriers. Everyone has limiting beliefs, including me. Do you know what yours are?
I was invited to deliver a series of workshops in Manchester and Amsterdam on the subject of “Strategic Business Development.” The attendees were directors, billing managers and senior consultants from the UK and Europe who responsible for managing teams and/or winning new business.
At one of the workshops, I taught these recruiters how to break boards with their bare hands! You might be wondering, what’s the point of this exercise?
Well, apart from the exhilarating feeling you get — it’s quite a rush, leaving you literally buzzing with adrenaline — it’s also a useful metaphor.
When you’re pursuing your goals, whether it’s your business objectives or personal goals, there are going to be some obstacles, some roadblocks, some barriers. And some of those constraints are real and some of them exist primarily in our own imagination.
If we can do this – break a solid, 3/4 inch thick pine board in half – something that you’ve probably never done before and maybe which previously you thought would be difficult, if not impossible, then what other possibilities does that create for you?
How many of the barriers, limitations, constraints that we perceive while we’re pursuing our goals exist really only just in our own imagination?
It’s a powerful idea, one that I would invite you to give some serious thought to. To achieve any goal, we must first believe that we can do it. We must accept and believe it’s possible, not in an abstract sense, as in “I suppose anything is possible” or “maybe it’s possible for a rare few” but that it’s a very real possibility that YOU personally can achieve it.
So one of the themes of this workshop was the power of beliefs and the effect that our belief system has on our expectations and the actual results that we obtain.
Another theme we explored was state management. So, achieving a peak performance state on cue, like dialing into our favorite radio station. If you could create within yourself a state of peak performance instantly, how powerful would that be?
I asked them to select their number one most important goal and write it on to the board. So that when we actually break the boards, then it will be like smashing your target.
Of course, I also taught them the technique required to break the board. However, knowing the technique isn’t enough — you need to bring the right mindset! Anything less than total commitment and the technique won’t work. If you hold back because you’re scared of failure, making a mistake or getting hurt, and don’t go for it 100% effort, then guess what? The board won’t break and you may even hurt yourself.
Isn’t that a lot like life? If you believe you can do something, and you give it everything you’ve got, then there’s no guarantee of success but your chances of achieving your goal increase dramatically. On the other hand, if you don’t believe it’s possible and you approach any task tentatively and without conviction, then you’ll probably produce exactly the result you expect – failure.
Watch the video above to see what happened. Too impatient to watch a 3-min video? Board breaking starts at 2:03!
