When something happens in life where I must prepare to do something I don't want to do, no matter how hard I try, my mind seems to shut down and I find it hard to stay motivated or take action.

It's like your mind just shuts down and you become a useless blob for a period of time. 

For example, I've recently been on an excellent roll building my businesses – as productive and motivated as I have ever been – but all of that seemed to come to a screaching halt this past few days, and I didn't even really notice until I had to help someone else go through a similar situation.

I've had a pretty tough go of it with a tooth infection, rounds of antibiotics and some other challenges this week that have led to more visits to my dentist than I've experienced in the last 3-years combined…and for me, because I had an absolutely brutal dentist as a kid, the dentist causes higher levels of anxiety for me than it would for most people.

But what is interesting is that I found I couldn't function properly leading up to the various dentist appointments.  It wasn't that I was thinking of this the entire time, but I found myself taking comfort with food, television, reading magazines and other activities that ended up to be quite unproductive. 

Does the same thing happen to you when you are leading up to an event, meeting or challenge that causes you anxiety, fear or uncertainty?

PREVENTING THE 'SHUT DOWN' EFFECT

Depending on your level of stress, anxiety, fear and uncertainty – losing productivity could become chronic if we can't figure out a way to get around this 'SHUT DOWN' effect our body uses to deal with our emotional challenges. 

Here is what I've been doing lately to make sure I can defeat this 'Shut Down' effect – see if it works for you too…

Try and get to the root of the problem. 

Why have you fallen into this pattern now – for most of us, this happens when we are overwhelmed or suffer anxiety over something in our lives.   I gave the example of pending dentist appointments as one source of anxiety. 

Often if we fear something coming – either a major change, major event,  our mind goes into defensive mode and pretty much shuts down.  After a few days of feeling like this, suddenly we have created a new learned habit – the bad habits become the norm. 

We can't typically break out of that norm until one of two things happen:

1. We recognize and deal with the root cause – either by standing up to our fear and anxiety or getting past the event (you know how sometimes you get more energy after something you weren't looking forward to is over) — OR –

2. Something major happens that jolts us out of our current situation…say a health challenge, major embarassment or some other life altering event that suddenly breaks you out of your current pattern. 

Counting on #2 is not exactly the best scenario – it may take a lifetime for such a 'JOLT' situation to occur, and nothing says that the major life change will be positive – so let's try and figure another way out of this unproductive mindset.

We really must work on understanding, admitting and then dealing with those situations that cause us anxiety.  Sometimes these are very obvious – as were my dental challenges this past week – other times these are buried deeply and can be quite painful – as in the case of child abuse for example. 

Whatever the case, you need to find out what is getting you down?  What is causing your mind to 'Shut Down'

What is making you feel somewhat out of control?

Once you have the factor, then you need to reframe your response to that feeling so that it is no longer causing you to shut down.   In my case, I like to do a few things to help put that fear or anxiety into perspective:

1. Write it out 20 or more times – studies have shown that just getting out the frustration or anxiety is thereputic in itself and can help ease the burden on your mind
2. I'm a big fan of meditation (don't worry, if you haven't been able to get meditation to work for you, check out Attracting Greatness which has many techniques, but also a kick-butt section on how to quickly & effectively master meditation).  Why will meditation help?  Meditation is wonderful for helping your mind NOT overreact to life's challenges.  When meditation works, you can visualize the most anxiety-ridden situations in your life without the slightest overreaction or discomfort – in short – you learn to go with the flow and not be impacted so much by stress and anxiety. 
3. Prepare…anxiety, stress and fear go down if we better prepare ourselves for upcoming situations.  Our typical response is to ignore the event or situation, but by dealing with it and preparing in advance, we can substantially reduce the impact that upcoming situation can have on our life. 

Let's hear from you if you have experienced this 'Shut Down' effect in your life?  What makes you 'Shut Down?" 

What sorts of things in your life cause you enough anxiety or fear to make you less effective….we all have them, leave a comment if you would like to share yours.

Make sense?

You may be happily married with a great family, but someone you may look up to (or down on as the case may be) has it together just a little better.

Or, you may be among the top players in your sport or in your profession, but there are still 5% of the people that are doing better…so the question becomes, how can I get better at what I do?

Indeed, you could also be in a position where you are in the bottom 5%, life has thrown you some challenges and now you are ready to embark on a program of change to help you get better at what you do.

After having modeled several of the highest achievers in life and developing the blueprint in Attracting Greatness, you can be more convinced than ever that you can make positive change in your life and that you can get better no matter where your starting point, you age or life situation.

Here are 3 tips to get you started on how to get better at what you do:

1. Elevate your expectations & standards: The reality of our lives is that we achieve (almost always) to the expected standard we set for ourselves.  Sure, we may dream bigger, we may want to be bigger, but do we EXPECT to be bigger and better?  That is the more important question — to get better at what you do you must work on your mind to frame a new set of expectations (not just dreams or desires).   While improving your results starts with a dream, altering your expectations is what really helps you get to the next level

2. Consistency. The universe values consistency at an exceptionally high level.  Raise your game for one or two days and then sink back to where you were will not only NOT get you to the next level in your life, it will demonstrate inconsistency which will also lower your credibility making it that much tougher to get better at what you do the next time.  Making small adjustments and commitments that you can put into practice consistently is better than making wild leaps that can not be sustained

3. Work on your self confidence. You do not get better at what you do without having a firm inner belief system that allows you to wander into the forest of the unknown with excitement and confidence rather than dread and uncertainty.  If you want to get better at what you do, then make sure you are ready to break down the barriers that fear and uncertainty will place in front of you.

Anyone can get better at what they do – it is a matter of combining fearlessness with consistency and a new set of expectations, armed with those 3 powerful things, you can really become unstoppable.

For sure a common trend among the most successful and happy people is a high sense of self worth, an inner peace and and outward expressions of self confidence.

So yes, to help become happier, more productive, achieve greater things in your life it makes sense to build self confidence, but…

As is pointed out brilliantly in the "Achieving Greatness Program" , boosting self confidence does not always equate to more happiness or positive achievements.

If someone is headed down the wrong path – has already been influenced to hang around with the wrong crowd, take the easy way out or aligns themselves with values that are not congruent with their own, then raising their self esteem will simply make them more effective at following this wrong path.

Many studies have demonstrated that top criminals, gang members or otherwise mis-aligned people have quite a strong sense of self confidence, but are often unhappy, filled with anxiety and are certainly not what we would typically think of as high achievers. 

So, what's missing?

The basis for any program designed to build self confidence must be an accompanying introspection – a discovery of what values and beliefs will truly make you happy. 

From this inner discovery can come a the launchpad for building self confidence that will help to more confidently achieve goals and objectives that will be fully in line with what makes you happy.

For example, the author of "The Parents We Mean To Be" Richard Weissbourd points out in this article that our focus to raise children with high self esteem, to be individually high achievers may in fact be training them away from what they internally value.  Instead of aligning their self confidence and associated behaviors with an inner value of giving, our kids are taught to ignore others and focus instead entirely on their own thoughts and actions.

So, we risk our children becoming highly efficient, self confident achievers but extremely unhappy, selfish and destined to health and emotional problems in the future due to not being aligned with their inner values, beliefs and life purpose. 

Is it important to build self confidence – Yes!

But, it is equally important to recognize our own internal values and life purpose in order that we target further self improvement on the right target.

What do you think – can self esteem be dangerous?

• We relax and enjoy life
• We attract other self-confident, happy people
• Everything seems to go right, as if it was according to some grand plan

So the question becomes not how to we build confidence once, but how do we learn confidence building techniques that last?

We can all remember times when we've been on top of the world, feeling the best we've ever felt, but then days later we may come crashing down and feel unhappy, depressed, empty, unfulfilled leading to bouts of low energy and procrastination.

What if we could stay on a more even path where confidence building techniques helped us to even out the low patches so that we had an overall higher level of self confidence and self-esteem, even in times that we can find quite challenging?

The techniques I've found most valuable to improving self confidence over the long term involve the following 3 areas – as outlined in the top selling and highly effective step-by-step blueprint in "Achieving Greatness" are:

1. To stop measuring yourself against others and instead draw your objectives and achievements from within
2. To uncover your living, existing life purpose
3. To seek confirmation and ongoing satisfaction from living in congruency with your life purpose

True confidence building transfers our constant seeking of affirmation and self-worth from feedback in the outside world (such as friends, family, influential figures, etc…) to an inward looking congruency with our inner purpose and beliefs.

For instance, we may hold a particularly negative view of our body based on images of those around us, models in magazines or television, holding ourselves up to an example created by society  which may – in fact – be incongruent with what our inner desires may be.

For example, we may wish to feel good, have more energy and live a healthy, happy life in tune with nature – if we are either not in tune with this life purpose or not living in harmony with this purpose then we have little chance of achieving any weight loss let alone the weight loss that gets us to some external measure.

First, we must stop measuring ourselves against false models – looking inward instead to find our life purpose.  This is the basis of all confidence building progress.

Next, we need to become more in tune with our inner voice through meditation and yoga.  Despite what you may think of these two techniques – they are not some form of mystical technique that magically brings meaning to our life – instead that meaning already exists, these techniques merely quiet our busy minds allowing that inner purpose and inner voice to be heard.

Finally, once we know of our inner purpose, final and lasting confidence building comes from a dedication to living each hour, each day, each week in alignment with our inner purpose and inner beliefs.

Simply knowing what our life purpose is does not in itself guarantee higher self-esteem – for that to be realized, happiness to be achieved, we must actively live our lives in the direction of this newly realized life purpose.  Only then will our self confidence remain on a level high.

To uncover the 5 pillars of Achieving Greatness – make sure you review this system – it has worked for many where dozens of other systems have failed.