What Holds You Back?

It’s that time again and if you have been on planet Earth for more than fifteen minutes, the conditioning during this time of year is to make and then break annual resolutions. And each year, millions of “experts” and amateurs offer advice for the myriad of ways you can use their suggestions, steps, services, and products for a fee or following, to make the necessary changes to fix your life. Each year, basically regurgitating the same information, repackaged to saturate the Internet, social media and our daily lives with well-intentioned, monetized offerings, unfortunately only adding to fears and piles of complacency.

In the interest of self-promotion and career milestones, a piece is forgotten. If people really want to be better and improve any or all aspects of their life, they first have to want the change within themselves, and to see a genuine reason why what they were thinking or doing no longer adds anything significant to their life. Nothing drives change more than the absolute commitment to change deep within our human essence, and nothing affirms change will be achieved more than a solid reason why the change is necessary to begin with, again from deep within the individual.

As most of us know by now, marketing and advertising is a many thousand-year-old tradition of deceiving people into thinking they want something, that they may kind of want, but may not exactly need, because after all, the premise of marketing and advertising is to convince you. We don’t have to be convinced to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep, and to feel. Most of us are able to do these actions without prompting. And if we want to do something different, that idea most likely came from something in our environment that we took notice of. Something that seemed more appealing than what we were currently thinking or doing. The challenge arises when that something is tied to social constructs like perceived beauty—so we annually struggle to lose weight and visually become something we believe is more desirable, or we may feel a need to increase our human worth—so we seek a different career, work opportunity, residential location, relationship, vehicle, or even body.

So much of these annual resolutions are placed on the idea that we are lacking in something, rather than on the idea of annually assessing what is adding value in our life and what is not. In truth, this process of assessing should be ongoing, but in the busyness of life, sometimes those valuable assessment practices can be overlooked in the focus on daily survival.

Another interesting point is how these assessments are meant to be meaningful and purposeful. For example, aside from everything going on in our immediate environment, in our local society, and in our world, the human essence of these assessments may be best performed apart from other social considerations. Meaning, it should be your own independent assessment of your life without any comparison to others. What makes you feel fulfilled, even if there is no one else you know who sees it that way or understands it that way. And of course, this is all still tied to the understanding of coexisting in harmony with others, and not about traumatic, disruptive choices that harm, endanger, traumatize, or hurt others.


Vernita Perkins, PhD and Leonard A. Jason, PhD

Life SkillsDrew Bartkiewicz