What do you want to do and what's holding you back?

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Positive thinking is great, and can improve anyone's life no matter who they are, but it can't fix deeper biological problems you are born with. Positive thinking improved my life, but only to an extent.

The problem with positive thinking and learning what it can do for you is that almost every story you hear is a success story. But that doesn't mean there are no stories of people who use positive thinking, yet still cannot reach their lofty dreams and goals. You don't hear about them in the media. Nobody writes books about them.

What really bugs me is when those who have become successful using positive thinking blame the individual for not using enough positive thinking. "You can't because you say you can't." While I'm certain that is often true, it is simply NOT true all of the time.

There really are people in this world who have very real problems they are born with, and that hold them back from achieving what they want to in life.

Positive thinking caused many a fantastic change in my life, but it has not yet brought about all of what I want out of life. And no, I did not just try it for a little while. It's been ten years, and i haven't given up yet. During those ten years though, I discovered the answer to life long problems with constantly being misunderstood and misinterpreting others. Those problems have led to many a problem connecting with people. True success doesn't come from sitting in a closet doing what you want to do. It takes relationships. It takes highly sophisticated and productive relationships.

Autism and Asperger's syndrome interferes with the ability to form sophisticated and productive relationships.

Being on the spectrum is now the only thing that holds me back. It's a very real problem that all the positive thinking in the world cannot "fix."

I said this in another thread. You can say to yourself all you want, "One day I will walk on the sun and survive." It will NEVER happen.

Beach house on Hawaii and surf/bike/run/swim/fly all day.

Money.

I believe that an Aspie who has full knowledge of their condition can hold them back, like they are adhering to what they've read or heard from the lips of some professional. Even though you have a diagnosis, you have to learn to kill the whole aura of AS within yourself. AS is a very demoralising condition that is an ultimate test to someone's character, it is an invisible being that is constantly throwing its nasty spanners into the works, the works being your life and successes, I have learn't to beat this thing many times and have become a bigger success then the NT's that I currently see on a weekly basis. That doesn't mean I am better person or above them, it just means that I have opened my eyes to more of life. I don't have a job and I claim benefits and that means I have more time to explore things, whereas they have jobs and other responsibilities, things which are killing their chance of major success. In the end, Aspies may have difficulties, but their lives are so much more fun. Generally. It depends on the Aspie, background and other things.

Yes, it does depend on the Aspie, their circumstances, the environment they grow up in, and the extent of their symptoms. I'm sure quite a lot do bury themselves in just "being Aspie" according to what they read and what their therapist tells them.

But many of us who don't do that, still have things going on within us that are what they are. Denying that doesn't change it. However being who we are doesn't mean we can't overcome, adapt, or "get around" a lot of the difficulties we have. We do need to do it differently though. Nothing in the methods, techniques and whatnot from the NT world has ever worked for me as effectively as advertised.

This is not to say there there is no way. I refuse to believe that. But it does mean in order for ME to achieve what I want to do, I need to come up with a different way. My own way. And that has taken time. A very long time.

I think denying the truth is a bad idea, and can lead to a lot of unnecessary frustration and heartache. Embracing it is good, but can be a double edged sword if its embraced like a security blanket. "This is who I am so I cannot change," is just giving up, and I don't recommend that either. What I promote is learning who you are, accepting it, and working WITH it, not against it.

You cannot do that until you understand what your strengths, AND your limitations are, and accept them, THEN learn to work with our around them. Simply telling yourself nothing stands in your way, when something actually does, is setting yourself up for failure just as surely as giving up is.

Lack of money and social anxiety....those are the 2 things that hold me back. Without that, my life would be easy I think.

Be a vet, people's ignorance.

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Assorted thoughts...

Those are two good questions:

What do you want to do and what's holding you back?

http://www.bthompson.net/quotationlinks/it_works.pdf (Possible insights)

What are seemingly impossible problems? Well, personally I don't know of any fast and easy answers for things like:

http://www.sportsconcussions.org/ today. Perhaps in a 1,000 years but not today.

I tend to feel that in some cases there can be an involuntary gitch in the ability of a person to imagine and sustain the attention required for a slighty better future. Goal achievement is sometimes triggered by a vivid mental picture of a desired end result. - http://www.grove.com/ - http://www.imaginationcubed.com/ -
http://www.daytimer.com/birk/ -

What do you want to do and what's holding you back? There can be a subtle and not that easy to fix neurological reason behind how some persons answer those two basic questions. That's my view/part of my view.

Sometimes there may be no easy answers it seems to me (Awakenings movie with Robin Williams based on a true story by Oliver Sacks).

A number of persons have said that acceptance, for them, was a kind of cure/at least a good start. They were able to move forward a little after accepting the cards in life they were dealt. They could accomplish, with a work ethic, (limited) goals.

The invisible hand of fate is holding me back!

Wait...that doesn't actually exist, so nothing can really hold me back because I don't feel anything holding me at all.

Things that are currently preventing me from leading a happy and productive life:

-Drunk People

-Lack of money/experience/job

-Getting lost/disorientated in crowded shopping/town centres

-Depression

-Fear of being watched by other people and security cameras

-Fear of being robbed

-Feeling helpless and powerless when I see/hear disasters/murders/abuse/rapes/abductions/terrorism/health scares and wars on the news that happened hundreds of miles away. This means that I'm unable to function for the rest of the day. I don't feel in control or able to help.

-Feeling unable to participate actively in a passive, sedentary, consumer orientated culture

-Having television themes, songs, dialogue playing over and over in muly head making it difficult for me to concentrate on tasks and what other people have to say.

-Me hearing the same songs being played on the radio over and overagain so that I memorise and analyse all of the words. If the radio is being played I hear it in the foreground, real people's voices in the background. The radio makes real people's voices hard to hear.

-Despair when I realise that the people "talking to me" on the radio and TV don't care about me or even know who I am, even though they sound friendly. Depersonalisation and wondering why real people don't talk to me, but people miles away in TV land do.

-Clumsiness, coordination issues

-Fear of being attacked/raped/taken advantage of

-Fear of unintentionally breaking rules/rules that I didn't know existed and having people shout at me

-Fear of being called stupid

-Fear of people saying: "You're so clever so why aren't you doing X, Y or Z?"

-Lonliness

-Feeling drained from having to help other people in the past. Teachers asking me to help others with their academic work when shedule was busy and ai felt exhausted.


-Fear of getting ill/not knowing what to do when I get I'll/people sacking me or calling me lazy if I'm ill. How do I talk on the telephone to say that I'm not coming in if I have a sore throat/respiratory infection? Do I use email instead?

-Fear of authority. Fear I will fill in forms wrong. Fear of people not expaining things to me properly

-My inability to do many things at once. I can only focus on one thing intense at a time.

-People misunderstanding me

-Hell is other people

-People saying that there's nothing wrong and telling me to "pull myself together"

-Bewildering social pragmatics. Wanting to socialise in a simpler way

-Adverts on the radio using persausive techniques and reverse pyschology irritating me.

-Junk culture and the worship of celebrity

-People talking about soap operas/football and me not knowing how to join in

-Fear/embarasmment of being the centre of attention/successful

-My brilliant eye for detail means that my brain perceives the physical detail and misses what other people are trying to communicate to me

-Having a non-verbal dialect and communication style that differs from 90% of the population

-Thinking deeply about things at the expense of chit-chat

-Depression/fear of people asking what I'm doing with my life

-Not being a people person, but caring deeply about others

-Women in make-up and high heels behaving in ways that I cannot fathom

-People close to me swearing at and bullying me

-Stressed, overworked people blaming all of their problems on me

-Controlling people who insist that they get over involved with every detail of my life

-Being told not to talk to strangers or leave the house when I was a child

-Having my family insist that they buy everything and do everything for me, so I didn't get to discover how to do things on my own

-Bombardment with media. Having the TV babysit me: I repeated every program word for word. Maybe my enforced social isolation, coupled with my constant exposure in my brain has garbled. Maybe this is why I struggle to sort real social information from background noise. This especially true if people leave the radio blaring away and try to talk to me. Being forced to watch educational videos. Video game addiction.

-Lack of opportunities to socialise and do no competitive, non alcoholic activities with sensible people

-Geographic isolation. Coming from a different cultural background. Being miles from people my own age.

-The high population density of my country

-The heavy volume of traffic on the roads/lots of road traffic accidents where I live. Other drivers' inconsiderate behaviour: tailgating, overtaking each other at 70 mph on narrow country lanes makes me afraid to learn to drive, limiting my mobility.

-Overcrowding in public places/public transport

-Supermarkets: noise, crowding, having to talk a different check out woman each time (so can't get comfortable or get familiar). The feeling of crushing annonymity. Screaming children being persauded to buy sugary cereal/sweets by cartoon characters.

-Feeling trapped and isolated: having to care for my disabled relatives and run errands for them

-Being female and not being able to communicate with other women in a way that I feel comfortable with. I communicate by commenting on the physical objects/enviroment around me. Women communicate by talking a lot about other people in their lives.

-Emotional overload. Constant exposure to strong emotions/love portrayed on the radio/media. Discussions about "soft topics" and personal growing up issues at school. These made me feel frightened, confused and unable to concentrate. People making a big song and dance about personal lives didn't really help either.

-An educational system that prefers grouped tables, cliquey discussion projects and a lot of abstraction, mindless chatty waffle to real hands on practical and experimental work. Studying on your own following your own topic of choice is pathologised. Solo work, mentoring and one person helping an entire group of people on his/her own are not regarded as valuable skills.

-Burnout from years of constant testing, high academic expectations and being ferried to
extra-curricular activities. Me being turned into a "question answering", "test taking" machine.

-My not knowing how to initiate a conversation. This meant that I was unable to join societies or have a social life. I missed out on all kinds of activities because nobody told me what to do.

-Toxic, abusive and stressed environments

-Lack of sensible, friendly support

-Fear of asking for help and being stigmatised

-The interview process

-Uncontrollable crying if I have to meet new people

-Society's overemphasis on social aspects of life. The pathologisation of solitude.

-A shy and retiring family

-Confusion over years of being labelled then not labelled

-Feeling angry and confused after watching a horrible bitchy woman on TV teaching social skills to people who look and behave just like my family.

-Having my practical, technical and science skills underrated by so many people

-Lack of human support/opportunities for my learning computer packages and developing these skills into a career

-Disagreeing with a lot of books on AS

-Being puzzled at angry at why personality traits of my family/best friends are classified as pathological

-Social anxiety, paranoia, afraid to trust people. Especially after being told that every stranger could be a potential murderer

-Lack of open natural spaces

-Having people look at me like I'm a witch whenever I walk around on my own

-Fear of people loving and liking me

-Agoraphobia

-Having a very small social network/family and friends scattered around in places that I can't reach them

-Never knowing when it's my turn to speak


Does that answer your question?

-Past abuse and bullying at school by pupils/teachers

Last edited by AmberEyes on 27 Aug 2010, 3:28 am, edited 14 times in total.

I just wanted to speak to this because I studied theater in college. Most people who act aren't famous or recognizable. And a lot of actors have other jobs as well. If you want to act, you could try out for something in your community, at least to see how you liked it.

All I want is to be happy with life like others around me seem to be.

What is holding me back from happiness? Your guess is as good as mine.

More things holding me back:

-Fear of failure

-Fear of rejection

-Fear of disease/contamination

-Fear of pushy Sales People with Plastic Smiles

-Fear of customer service people

-Fear of Airports

-Fear of Landlords

-Fear of Dinner Ladies

-Fear of Cowboy Plumbers

-Fear of getting stuck in a crowded lift

-Fear of fainting onto the concrete and smashing head open

-Fear of upsetting people

-My not feeling able to tell the truth about my situation to other people

-Fear of death

I'd like to travel, to experience things. To expose myself to new ideas, people, places, experiences, and ways of thinking. I'd like to live life, not just exist in a box. Money holds me back here, due to my inability to hold down a job long.
I would also like to be a soldier - many things squash that one - my country, my gender, and my health.

i want to get on the space shuttle and security holds me back.

I've read every post and I find all of them quite interesting, so much so that I was well on my way to writing a huge reply to every single one of them, like I did in the neighbours thread, but I realised all my replies to you had a similar theme, so I might as well just ask a few more simple questions in response to you all at once (Without trying to be patronizing)

When was the last time you did anything to try and overcome the things that you think are holding you back? What was it you did, and what did you hope that step would achieve in relation to the complete goal?

Believe me, I don't simply mean this as a subtle jab at you, saying "come on, you're not trying", obviously no one alive really stops trying, if they did their heart wouldn't be beating, I'm just interested in what you all actually are doing to get through something that you see as an obstacle between you and the goal that you consider worth trying to achieve.

Even if it didn't seem to work... If it didn't, did you learn why it didn't? Do you plan to use that knowledge to take a more informed stab at it? Or are you too fed up and no longer think it's worth it?

Again, not trying to patronize anyone or act obnoxiously positive or "motivational". I have troubles and bad moods too.

I have wanted to be a writer since I was 10, which is nearly 37 years ago. I have written lots of "things"; first chapters, rough ideas, bits, half-finished short stories, a first draft of an autobiography, an apparently page-turning essay on gender in Hans Christian Andersen fairytales, thousands of pages of journal ... and a lot of pretty lengthy posts on WP too :lol.

I have slid backwards and forwards over these 37 years between a carefully studied/contrived self-protective dismissal of/indifference to my failure to write a book and periods of miserable self-flagellation, desperation, feelings of hopelessness about it.

In July a very old friend recently rediscovered on Facebook sent, ( on my asking to see it ), a copy of a book proposal that they were sending to agents. And it was as if for the first ever time it occurred to me/"sank in" that "real" people, people that I knew for example, did write books. Within a week I subscribed to a small ( and cheap ) online writing course, and a couple of weeks later I signed up to NaNoWriMo, ( National Write a Novel in a Month, which takes place, "online", in November, and involves writing 50,000 words in 30 days ). It's a free "deadline", ( ie. one that you don't have to be in a job, or at college, to be given ).

So far I have sent in, and received feedback on, the first of the ten modules of the writing course, and finished about half of the second, ( which is character creation ), ... but am currently very stuck.

I have also begun gathering and making notes of ideas, characters, settings, themes, etc for NaNoWriMo, and learning about story structure and technique etc, ( mostly at Dramatica Theory's website, but also at Jim Hull's "storyfanatic" site, and from books that I have bought from Amazon ), and am hoping that when it comes to November I will have not only a rich "compost" of ideas, characters,etc but a clear enough plot outline to not simply waffle for 50,000 words, something I could probably do standing on my head, but instead get a complete ( and reasonably credible/solid ), story-arc down in words, however clumsily, before the 30 November.

I can not say yet how helpful these steps are, or will be, in reaching my goal of writing and publishing a book.

The last time that I set out to take steps towards, or overcome a perceived obstacle to, an important goal was ... When was the last time I had a goal and aimed for it?

Umm, let's see ... maybe mental health, which I achieved by changing my diet ...

After about 14 years of struggling with this I at last succeeded in maintaining a consistent and long-term exclusion diet, as opposed to unsatisfactory and only ever partially successful on-off short-term efforts, after I discovered ( three years ago now ) that a whole heap of my issues weren't mental-health ones but AS, ( which cleared up why some things just never got better! :lol ) and finding a couple of brilliant websites/forums stuffed with info and scientific studies on the links between diet and mental health, ( mainly mood-disorder and depression, but also poor cognitive function ), which relieved the pressure of thinking, like a lot of people around me did, that believing that I could cure mental illness with diet was itself a sign of mental illness.

I have managed to stick to a gf ( and mostly low-carbo and little-dairy ), diet for nearly three years now, partly because of all the information, but also because of the support and helpful "exposure-pressure" that I got from talking about it here on WP on a "GFCF Diet Support Group Thread" that I started.

I'm hoping that NaNoWriMo will function in the same way, though beginning to think that so many people do it now, ( 140,000, or is it 170,000, took part last year ), that the kind of exposure that the founder says acts as a "support", ( exactly like my GFCF thread ), is no longer so concentrated, and a lot of people will inevitably be invisible/slip through the "attention-support" net in that sort of crowd. Which is why I posted a thread about it in the WP "Art, Writing and Music" forum, hoping that other people would want to join me in a WP support group for it, but so far no one has posted to say that they are planning on doing it.

PS. I have thought, several times in the last couple of years, that I wanted to move back to England, and last Autumn I visited Bristol for a few days to look around, but the trip was a total and utter disaster, and at the moment I am almost glad of it.
.

I want to feel healthy and 100% every day. Health problems are holding me back. To overcome it, I am seeing various doctors, following their advice, having all necessary tests. So far things are not improving, but all I can do is be patient and believe I can get there.

I want a new job in a field I am passionate about. Fear of change, and limited options have held me back. To overcome this, I have had to go outside my comfort zone and be persistent and resourceful. Recently I had a very successful interview and am patiently waiting to hear back. Either it will be the fulfillment of a dream, or I will have to go back and search some more.

I want meaningful social relationships. Friendships, romantic partner, or both. The difficulties of AS, combined with my highly specific preferences in people, have held me back. To overcome this, I am investing more and more time in online communication (message boards, blogs, dating sites) where I can express myself well, while also keeping up in-person activities like meetups, which are not the best for me but offer some chance of connection.

I want rich and rewarding life experiences, such as travel, a home environment that perfectly suits me, and a daily routine filled with pursuit of adventures rather than obligations. Ambivalence about what I want, impatience for researching and negotiating the logistics, and a hopelessness that I can accomplish this by myself, are holding me back. These seem to be very hard things to overcome. If I make progress on the other areas first, I might be better equipped for this one.

I am hoping I have enough time to reach all my goals and realize the benefits of my hard work.