Speaking of Barriers

So that article about Passive Barriers has got me thinking... about the barriers in my own life, and the ones that I see around me.

I work as a consultant for a tech company (read temp) and after reading the article, I called up my employer asked if they had a 401k. It turns out that they do, and even though it's non-matching, I signed up to drop about 13% of my income into it. I got to that number by calculating how much the first hour of every day at work would get me.

My barrier to having done this before was thinking that a "temp" agency wouldn't have a 401k available for their consultants. Turns out I was wrong.

Another barrier that I run into a lot is the "What if someone sees me?" question. I'm not talking about the kind of thing that would end up with the police getting involved... more along the lines of people seeing me doing something silly or foolish looking. In this case, doing "Burpees." I found this blog where folks are working on their 100 burpee challenge, and it has inspired me to start doing that too. Whether or not I can make it to 100 days remains to be seen, but I can at least start.

So I was walking around the building I work in during my lunch, and it occured to me that I could just go ahead and do a burpee or two right then and there. But I looked around and saw that I was next to an office building, and there were windows where people could see me, so I didn't do it.

Thinking about it after the fact, I realize that the odds of anyone actually seeing me do two burpees was actually pretty slim.

Then I realized that even if someone actually did see me, the odds of me caring about their opinion was even slimmer.

And even if it turned out that someone that I knew, and who's opinion I cared about saw me, I could tell them about the exercise that I was getting and they'd congratulate me. So there's really no barrier at all. I intend to do my burpees as I walk to my car once I'm off work.

So where else does that particular barrier apply? How often do I change my behavior based on the imagined opinions of a possible audience? And where did that one come from in the first place.

... and then there's the question of how can I use this to my advantage, or change it into something more useful? :)

reboot?

I just finished reading a really good article over at the Get Rich Slowly blog about the Psychology of Passive Barriers. It's basically about how inconsequential, easily overcome obstacles can stop us from doing the things that we want to do, or keep us doing the things that we don't want to do.

For example... not posting to a blog just because the things that you're thinking about don't have anything to do with hypnosis.

So here's an idea. If this was going to be an exclusively about hypnosis blog, I would have called it "HypnoBlog" or something of the sort. Since it isn't, I'll just post whatever gets stuck in my head.

Three cheers for happy, posty goodness.