The ugly truth about why you are not seeing the success you deserve!

It is shocking to me to see the sheer number of people I meet who have been unsatisfied with their current life for months, years, or even decades. I don’t know who gave out the message that whatever you have chosen to become your profession can’t be changed.

Everything can be changed. You don’t like your job, change it. You don’t like your house or apartment, change it. You don’t like your partner…no, that would be too easy :-).

Nobody, I repeat, nobody is telling you that you can’t change what you don’t like, besides yourself. Yes, my friend, it is that simple. You are the one and only, holding you back from living your dream, following your passion, feeling deep life satisfaction, every single day.

You don’t like what you hear? You tent do disagree with me? Really?

Let me prove it to you. Let’s do a little exercise together. You tell me at the end who is right and who is wrong (I normally don’t care about this, but here I make an exception for you to make my point – because I know I’m right 😉 ).

You don’t know what you expect from your life?

Start with what you dislike about your current life. Set your timer to 15 min. Take a pen and a sheet of paper and start writing down what comes to your mind. Don’t overthink it, simply capture everything that comes up without judging or analyzing it. A simple brain dump.

When you are done with this, look at your list. Do you spot any common themes? Can you see opposites like “I dislike that others tell me what to focus on” instead of “I love to set my own goals and focus areas”? Take another 15 min to complete the next part. Take a new sheet of paper and label it “LIKES” and put it to the right side of you. Now you take the first sheet from the earlier exercise and label it “DISLIKES” and put it to the left side of the empty sheet.

Now you identify the opposite of each of your “DISLIKES” and write it onto the new sheet “LIKES” in the same position, so when you have completed the exercise, you can compare both “LIKES” and “DISLIKES” easily.

Are you done? See how easy this was. You spend about half an hour to complete this very important foundation to change your entire life if you are in.

Define your life goals

Congratulations, you just completed the first step of defining your life goals by identifying the opposite of your dislikes, which are your likes.

Take now only the “LIKES” sheet, look at it and formulate that one sentence that will reflect your goals for your life. Let me give you a little example. Years ago, when I have been where you are today, I did the exact same exercise. I looked at my current life as a successful Director in the IT Distribution industry, leading 100+ employees, traveling the world, being in meetings all day long, having hundreds of meetings every day, eating unhealthy, not having made the time for sports, nor my family, kids, and wife. I felt exhausted, burned-out, and absolutely depressed with the outlook of continuing exactly this for the remainder of my work life, which would have been a good twenty years until retirement age. OMG.

I knew I couldn’t go on like this for much longer, but needed that external force. It got harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. My mood changed rapidly. Day after day I got darker thoughts. It hurt. I had never experienced anything like this. I always progressed, full steam ahead. Opportunities popped up and I took them. If I had to write a job application it was only a formality for HR as I got the job already. But now everything was different. It felt heavy and I started to feel pain. Real physical pain. If this wouldn’t have been worse enough, I started to feel fear. For the first time in my life. Fear for my life. I felt everything slipping away. Business-wise and on a personal level. When I’m at home, which wasn’t that often, to be honest, I wasn’t really there. When I’m at work, I wasn’t really there either. How strange is that?

I needed to change to save my life, my health, and my family. So went off to find my true passion and the right business idea. I started researching the topic, found a couple of coaches, books, podcasts, but nothing really made me excited. Until I found this great coach in Germany. She offered a 13-weeks online course on how to find your true passion and the corresponding profession that fits your dreams. I signed up right away (read all about my story in my very first blog post).

Been super motivated, I started with week one module right away, did all the exercises, and couldn’t wait for the second-week assignments to be released. My energy lasted for about six weeks, until things at work got really busy again, there been some family events, and a bunch of other things. I know today, these only been excuses as the process got more and more intense. It’s been decision time. Uncomfortable decision time. Why? Because the decisions I was about to make would not only change my life, it would change the lives of my family, our entire lifestyle, we even would have to sell our house, and move back to Germany, which we never wanted to do. So I put it off. Subconsciously, but I did it.

Why your corporate job is like a honeypot?

It took me many years until I finally understood what my mentor meant when he said “Your corporate job is like a honeypot. It is sweet and tasty, but you are sinking in, slowly but surely”.

Now I finally understood what he meant. You have this great package, high job grade, big salary, amazing benefits, traveling the world, and feel you are important when being in a corporate job. But it is eating your brain, your soul, your life.

Not only that, but it is also a false feeling of security, which I had to learn the hard way a bit later when being laid off from corporate jobs twice until I finally listened to the underlying message.

“Happy cows give more milk”. That’s the other thing my mentor kept telling me. What he meant is that while in a corporation, the organization will do everything possible to keep you happy, motivated, excited. Why? Because if you are fired up, you will give everything and more. You will go above and beyond. Give 150% or even more.

So the corporation will give its employees as much “grass” as possible to feat us to the max, so we give as much milk as possible. It’s all about ROI (Return-on-Investment). Until, yes, until we are “used up”. We are empty. The performance goes down. We deliver less and less milk, get sick, maybe even affect other cows which in turn will reduce their milk output as well.

So what do you do? Get wired of the under-performer, the sick cows fast, and get new ones. Fresh, young, motivated, formable, so the cycle starts all over again.

I’m not saying that corporations are evil, all I’m saying is that if you have the entrepreneurial blood as I do have, you expect more from life, that’s why you don’t fit in.

If you want to live the life of your dreams. Work indecently, have the flexibility to truly combine family and your work-life, if you do have the entrepreneurial DNA, there is only one big mistake you can make.

To not take action!

You only have one life. Live it the way you want. Live the life of your dreams and start doing what you love for a living.

Do you want to learn more about how to find your true passion and business idea, my process, all my secret productivity hacks, tips & tricks?

Simply email me or book a free call with me at https://martinmeitza.com/calendar/.

Until next time,

Martin