Would You Wear A Diaper To A Meeting? These Childhood Habits Could Be Holding You Back

 

Today’s topic is a serious one. We’re going to talk about an insidious problem that’s holding a lot of people back in business and life. And they don’t even know what it is or that it’s happening. Whether your childhood was traumatic, normal, or even amazingly great, you haven’t made it to adulthood without one or more coping mechanisms that served you as a child but don’t help you now. And you cannot develop the winning mindset you want or live your dream life if you don’t address these hidden coping mechanisms. But how? April talks about that in episode 22 of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Would You Wear A Diaper To A Meeting? These Childhood Habits Could Be Holding You Back

This topic is a little more serious than most, and not that we don’t take mindset seriously, we 100% do. This is something that has come up in several conversations with people and made me realize that a lot of times, this is holding people back and they don’t even know what it is or that it’s happening. How could you address it? I absolutely want to share it with you.

No matter how you grew up, whether you had a childhood like mine that was marked with some abuse and trauma and tough things going on, or you had a relatively normal or amazing childhood. None of us makes it to adulthood without at least one of these three skills/coping mechanisms that helped us a lot in childhood but do not serve us now. We can’t get to where we want to be if we are using the exact same skillset that got us here. I’m going to share these three with you. I’m going to tell you what they are and also what the other side would look like if this was no longer something that was holding you back.

The first one and this is one I absolutely struggled with over responsibility. I grew up in a household with substance abuse, unreliable parents, and all of those things. I was hyper-responsible. You know that you are a person like this. If you’ve ever heard the comment that you were an adult in a child’s body, you were exceptionally responsible, or you can always count on yourself to do this, that can be great because we want to be responsible.

Here’s what over-responsibility looks like. You are the one who always makes sure the ball doesn’t drop, whether it’s in your family or your workplace. If anyone else doesn’t carry their weight, you just automatically pick it up. This can feel overwhelming and lonely. It can feel like the buck stops here no matter what. You never have any help. It can also feel exhausting and never-ending because the truth is you are responsible to people but you are not responsible for them. When you have over responsibility, it tends to manifest in a bunch of different ways.

 

For example, you don’t want to let go of that employee that’s not doing a great job because you worry about how it’s going to impact their life versus them worrying about the fact that they’re not doing their job and how that’s impacting your life. Let’s turn it around and say maybe you don’t want to stop using a certain vendor because you know that your business is a certain amount of their revenue and so you feel responsible for how their business does but you want to let go of that vendor because they aren’t doing a good job. That’s you taking over responsibility.

Instead of being responsible just to them and showing up and doing your part, you are responsible for them in your own mind. A lot of times, this is subconscious. You’re not showing up to them and being responsible. You are going to take their weight and their work and perform it as well. This is something that can make each and every day feel harder and more work. You sometimes don’t get to the things that really matter to you because you’re taking care of so many things for other people.

 

Here’s another one and this is one that I would wager every single one of us learned in childhood. It’s looking for approval. Let’s get that gold star because we did such a good job on our paper. Let’s get the coach to tell us that they’re really proud of us. Let’s make Mom and Dad happy because we made the team, got into that college, and got good grades. However it looked, you learn very early on that if you do things that people approve of, then you get a reward of some sort, whether it’s attention, approval, or a pat on the back. As a kid, we’re trained to do that because so many adults want us to do certain things in life and there are so many rules.

Yet the thing is, as you become an adult and you’re seeking the approval of others, you find out that people are unreliable. You can be doing the perfect things all the time and twisting yourself into a literal pretzel. People still aren’t giving you approval, not because you aren’t doing great things, but because they’ve got other things on their minds or their foot hurts. They’re in a bad mood or not paying attention because they’ve got other things to do and you aren’t their singular focus.

When you get to be an adult and you find that you are looking for other people’s approval, it is a losing game and they’re unreliable. It also holds you back because the first thing you think about is what will so-and-so think, what will this person think, or what will that person think. Even though often, they’re not thinking about you at all anyway. The approval that you need is your own. If you approve of yourself, if you believe in yourself, if you know that you are living your purpose and doing what you believe in, no one else’s approval matters. It is super freeing. You get a lot of time back because you only have to check in with one person and that’s you. It also allows you to do much more in your life because you are not worried about how it will look. It removes a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety.

The approval that you need is your own. If you approve of yourself, if you believe in yourself, and if you know that you are living your purpose and doing what you believe in, no one else's approval matters. Share on X

The third one and this was also one of mine. Whether you grew up in an environment that was chaotic or you grew up with a lot of folks who were go-with-the-flow, take-it-easy people, but you felt like things needed to happen on a certain timeframe and things, you may have developed the habit of trying to control things, like control your environment, the way other people feel, or the way that things are happening. On the one hand, you are probably organized. You get a lot of things done and are responsible and people can rely on you. On the other, you tend to micromanage life for yourself and the people around you. It can be really suffocating for folks and feel bad for them because they think that if they don’t do things the way that you want, you are not going to care about them or like them anymore.

What you find is the more that you try and control people, environments, and things, the more they tend to push up against that, rebel, and not want to do the things that you want them to do. Control is an illusion because you’re looking for safety and feeling good no matter what happens and you can’t feel good no matter what happens so you want to control what happens. Even in that statement is your actual answer. The other side of this is can you find a way to be prepared mentally to understand that no matter what happens, you will be okay.

Now, a great thing here is how your mindset work. It is understanding that even when things happen differently than you wanted them to or they feel outside of your control, you can go back and see lots of different situations that have worked out to your benefit, even if you didn’t feel like you had control of them at the moment. All three of these things are things that can hold us back from being the best versions of ourselves, accomplishing the hopes and dreams that we have that seem so elusive because we aren’t even aware that we are holding ourselves back with behaviors that used to serve us. We develop them for a reason, but they don’t serve us anymore. The easiest way for us to start to address those is to recognize them.

 

I want you to take the next few days and pay attention to the things that happen and ask yourself those questions. Am I overly responsible? Am I trying to take control of everything? Am I looking for everyone else’s approval? I will tell you, as someone who used to deal with all three of these, each one of these no longer being something that I have to deal with in my life allowed me to uplevel and get to the next place I wanted to go in the life that I wanted to have. It will do the exact same thing for you. Here’s to your success.