Beware Of The Enemy In The Camp

…imagine for a moment that there was someone close to you that didn’t want you to be successful?

Someone that you trusted that talked you out of changing your life for the better?

Someone that was supposedly on your team, but knocked your confidence at every turn?

I’m sure you’d show them the door.

But what if they were so close to you, that you didn’t even realize they were there? – Pulling strings in the background.

I don’t have to ask if you’ve got an enemy in your camp, because I know you do.  – We all have them. They’re that little voice in the background that chimes in with a piece of advice that most times isn’t to our advantage.

For some of us, we’ve been listening to them so long we assume that they’re part of us. – We grew up together. They know us. They know what we can and can’t do. And they’re looking out for us.

That last piece is the sneakiest tactic of all that the ‘enemy in the camp’ uses against us. – It makes us believe that it’s looking out for us.

It’s our buddy. – And buddies don’t lie to each other, right?

Here are some of the sneaky tactics it uses…

Negotiation – It talks you out of making a decision that you want to make. 

‘Let’s sleep another half hour this morning instead of getting up so early.’ 

‘No one’s going to notice if you don’t do the job properly.’ ‘Take today off you’ve worked hard this week.’ 

‘You’ve been good have that piece of cake, you deserve it.’

Fear – It makes you think that it’s looking out for you. 

‘If you post that what will your friends say? Let’s not do it.’ 

‘What if you write that book and it bombs?  And what if we got bad reviews? Everyone could read them?’

‘Let’s just think about what you’re about to do. You’ve never done this before so let’s take a few days to think about it?’

Safety – It makes us believe that where we are is where we should stay for safety’s sake. 

‘You know, going to the gym is a good idea but will you feel comfortable exercising in front of those thin people? Let’s save that money and buy a fitness DVD instead. We’ll put that on next week’s shopping list.’

‘Doing TikTok sounds like it might help us, but what if it doesn’t? What if it turns people off you and the business? Then we’d be in a worse place. How about we keep doing what we’re doing, I’m sure it’ll all work out fine eventually.’

‘You know, I heard that people that try and write for a living are few and far between. Can you imagine if we wrote that series of books, and all the time it would take, and it all was for nothing? Let someone else be stupid enough to go through all that. We’re cleverer, right?  We’ll find something else that works better.’ 

And each time we listen to those helpful whispers we stay where we are.

It still isn’t the place we want to be, but we’re making the best choices, we’re not going to embarrass ourselves or fail, and there’s always next week to get started.

We feel that we’re the clever ones and yet live a life that we’re miserable living. – Not realizing that our so-called best friend is the one that keeps us there.

My own journey has involved listening less to the ‘helpful friend’ of mine. – Going from shelf stacker to popular kids’ authors, and then to creating and selling my own digital products I realized how stupid I’d been to listen to it as much as I did. — You can read all about it in ‘The Online Business Manifesto.’ To pick up your free copy head on over to https://www.WriteCome.com now.