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“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin
I’m probably standing in my own way right now too. Are you?
I’ve heard so many times that people don’t understand what it means to be “standing in your own way,” so I thought I’m going to give it a shot and write about it.
And the problem is actually a very important one when it comes to personal development and growth in life.
You can prevent yourself from achieving what you want without even realizing that you’re actually the barrier.
But before I get into the signs, I wanted to give you three examples from my personal life that help you understand what it means to stand in your own way.
The wish to have a nice family
The mother of my ex-girlfriend had a complicated relationship with her other daughter, let’s call her Lisa. They barely spoke because Lisa never felt accepted by her mother. Meanwhile, her mother believed that Lisa’s behavior was the problem.
After years of blaming each other, they decided to work on their relationship. Lisa tried to involve her mother more in her life, and her mother started therapy. But despite their efforts, nothing really changed. The mother continued criticizing how Lisa raised her children and how she handled her marriage.
One day, while sitting at the table with my ex-girlfriend and her mother, she told us something her therapist had said.
Apparently, the therapist told her that she was standing in her own way.
She laughed cynically and asked, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I immediately understood what the therapist meant, but I didn’t want to get involved in their family drama, so I kept my mouth shut.
What I wanted to tell her was simple: If you want a better relationship with your daughter, stop trying to change her.
Accept her decisions, support her, and offer advice when she asks for it.
The mother dreamed of those picture-perfect Christmas gatherings. She wanted to be a good mother and have a close relationship with her daughters.
But she wasn’t willing to change the very behavior that was pushing one of them away.
She went to therapy, convinced she was working on herself, yet continued doing the same things because she believed she was already doing everything right.
And that’s exactly what standing in your own way can look like.
You desperately want something to change, but you refuse to recognize that you might be part of the reason it isn’t changing.
The wish for professional and financial development
Another example is what I experienced at work.
One of my colleagues wants to get a raise just for the sake of getting more money.
His boss told him that he wants him to be more innovative and focus on the development of our tech infrastructure.
But he is someone who resists using technologies like AI.
He says that it’s just a stupid chatbot, and he talks about it in a cynical way all the time.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not about AI, but AI is one of the innovative ways of working if you work at a tech company.
Instead of embracing it, he refuses to use it, but he wants to develop professionally.
Guess what? He is standing in his own way.
The wish for a romantic relationship
And here I am as the third example, with the addition that I know that I’m standing in my own way when it comes to dating.
I would like to have a romantic relationship, but I haven’t been going out too often recently.
So it would be easy for me to blame women for not seeing me and giving me a chance while chilling on the couch.
Fortunately, I know that that’s the reason why I don’t meet potential women too often, but even if I know it, I’m still standing in my own way.
In all three cases, the same thing happens: habits and attitudes prevent us from achieving what we want.
Not fate, not bad luck, not others. But ourselves.
But why do we behave like this?
Obviously, this is not something we do deliberately because I assume that we want to be happy, successful, loved, and satisfied at the end of the day.
Still, there are parts of our behavior and thinking that sometimes prevent us from doing so.
We want change, but we don’t want to change.
This is probably the most common reason. You want to achieve something, but you’re not ready to accept and do what it requires of you.
Like me in the example above. I want to meet a woman, but I don’t want to go out. Others want to lose weight but are not ready to give up the pizza and beer combo. Others want to grow but avoid situations where they feel incompetent.
Psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe something similar as Immunity to Change. Their research suggests that people can genuinely want to change while simultaneously holding other commitments that prevent them from doing so.
We don’t like admitting that we’re wrong
Another common reason is that our ego might be standing in our way, and we don’t want to admit that we are wrong.
Happens to me all the time, and it can also happen to you.
The problem gets harder if it’s about something we’ve believed for years or even our entire lives, and it turns out to be wrong or different.
In those cases, you might feel an even stronger resistance to thinking about the validity of your beliefs.
Imagine that you have blamed women for your bad relationships your entire life. Admitting that you played your part in those relationships can be uncomfortable.
We prefer what feels familiar
You love it, I love it, we all love it when something feels familiar.
Even if it is a bad thing.
If we don’t want to stand in our own way, that usually requires change, and change often feels unfamiliar.
Trying something new means accepting that we might fail, look foolish, get rejected, or discover that we’re not as good at something as we thought.
Those feelings give us enough reason not to take a step out of our own way.
Avoiding discomfort feels easier than making progress
Staying home on the couch feels good.
And avoiding a hard conversation also feels better than going into a battle while not knowing what the outcome will be.
Talking about that relationship problem at the weekend instead of today is better.
And that often becomes our problem.
We choose relief today over the improvement that could make us happier in the long term.
That is also a behavior that keeps us standing in our own way.
Signs you’re standing in your own way
The only question remaining is how we can notice that we are standing in our own way.
Here are the signs you can pay attention to: