​I am a firm believer that we are born with great mental strengths; along with the ability to achieve whatever we really want to do.

It is just that each day, we let life eat away at us; damaging our self-esteem and confidence. We resist our own ideas and motivations and settle for the life we already have.

I recently watched this excellent video form ​Mel Robbins, where she discusses the simple though not easy, way that you can stop screwing yourself over and go after what you really want in life.

In this talk, ​Mel talks about how we settle for 'fine' and talk ourselves out of doing the great things that we are meant to do.

Watch the video below:

​Source

​Below are my key takeaways from this talk on ​'how to stop screwing yourself over'. I have also added some thoughts of my own.

​One third of Americans are dissatisfied with their life. There is no reason to believe that this is any different for any other country or nationality. People want more from life but they are not getting up and going after it. Therefore, there is little hope of this dissatisfaction statistic improving. If anything the statistic is likely to get worse.

​Everybody likes to say that they are ‘fine’, but you are only going to get one shot at this life so, is ‘fine’ good enough? Of course not. So, why do so many people accept being ‘fine’ as good enough.

Robbins points out that we are born amazing. For example, the chance of anyone of us being born is 400 trillion to one. It is an amazing achievement just to be born so we should realise that we were not born for nothing. Each of us has something to offer this world, a way to make the world a better place. Each of us has good ideas each day so, we need to start acting upon them.

There is more than enough information available e.g. books, internet etc, that tells us what we need to do to bring our ideas to life, but we resist. But if we tell ourselves that we are fine, then we don’t feel the need to take action. So, we give ourselves a free pass, allowing ourselves to take the easy way out.

​Robbins argues that our mind likes to work on autopilot, saving energy and effort in the process. There are so many things that we must do on any given day that we could not complete them if we had to think about every single step. So, we form habits which allow our minds to follow these steps repeatedly, without ever having to think about it.

However, we also have a deep inner need to explore new things. If we do not exercise this need, we become stuck, frustrated and dissatisfied. But when we try to do something new, we are taking our brains out of autopilot into an area where they are uncomfortable. The brain then produces a series of thoughts aimed to get us to resist the change or new pursuit e.g. ‘you can’t do that’. ‘it will all go wrong etc.’.

Robbins argues that in order to defeat the resistance, we need to take immediate action (within 5 seconds) on our ideas or we are likely to be overcome by the resistance. It doesn’t matter what the action is as long as it is relevant to the completion of the idea. It can be the smallest action but once you have begun to act on the idea, you have opened a little file in your mind which you can only close by following through. Thus, you are more motivated to follow through on the idea.

​So, with all that said, what is one small step you can take today to ​start acting on your great ideas?​