#1: Why You Can’t Get What You Want
Why is it that so many people go after goals and they don't achieve them?
Why do so many people set New Year's resolutions and they stick with it maybe for a few weeks, and then they give up?
Today, Dr. Steve Orma dives into why so many of us struggle to reach our goals. He believes it's because we're not using our minds effectively and we're held back by limiting beliefs. Dr. Orma points out that our education systems and negative messages from those around us often lead to disempowering thoughts that stop us from making progress. He stresses the importance of recognizing and changing these subconscious beliefs, which he refers to as 'blind spots,' to achieve significant, life-changing goals.
Dr. Orma encourages us to take a look at our achievements and seek out perspectives from people we trust to challenge and change these limiting beliefs. Throughout the episode, he shares personal stories and practical steps to help us start reprogramming our minds for success. The episode wraps up with some actionable advice on how to boost self-awareness and set proactive goals.
In this episode you’ll learn:
The KEY ingredient to achieving insane goals
How limiting beliefs shape your reality
How EVERYTHING in your life was created by you
The truth about achieving the impossible
What a “blind spot” is and how to know if you have one
Remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want!
Steve Orma
SUBSCRIBE
00:00 Unlocking Your Potential: Why You're Not Achieving Your Goals
01:33 The Power of the Mind: Understanding Its Role in Achieving Goals
02:04 The Impact of Education and Environment on Our Beliefs
03:57 How Limiting Beliefs Shape Our Reality
05:05 Taking Control: The Path to Changing Your Life
05:59 The Truth About Achieving the Impossible
08:32 Identifying and Overcoming Blind Spots
12:18 Realizing Your Potential for Incredible Achievements
15:01 Personal Stories of Transformation and Success
20:48 Next Steps: Reflecting on Your Achievements and Potential
RESOURCES
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Insane Goals Podcast. I'm Dr. Steve Orma, clinical psychologist and goal achieving specialist. Each week, I discuss how to achieve massive goals, smash conventional thinking, and give you a radically different vision of what's possible for your life right now.
Hey, everyone in today's episode, I'm going to talk about why you can't get what you want. Why is it that so many people go after goals and they don't achieve them?
Why do so many people set New Year's resolutions and they stick with it maybe for a few weeks, and then they give up? This is a key question to answer, because if you want to achieve any goal, and this podcast is about achieving insane goals, which are huge, [00:01:00] massive, you know, goals that you achieve that, that radically transform your life. If you want to achieve insane goals or any type of goal, you need to know what gets in the way, kind of the main thing that gets in the way of people achieving those goals. The short answer to this is people don't know how to use their minds effectively to think, to figure things out and to get the things that they want. And they're also holding a lot of limiting or false beliefs in their mind that they're not even aware of that get in the way of them getting the things that they want that sabotage them.
So that's what we're going to talk about today.
The Power of the Mind: Understanding Its Role in Achieving Goals
The first thing I want to start with is why this happens. You know, we are all born with this incredibly powerful mind. the mind is just an attribute of the brain. That's our ability to think to reason to figure things out, to be creative. It's basically what we use to guide ourselves through our life. So we're all born with this incredibly powerful tool. But then why aren't we getting the things that we want in our life? Well,
Mainly it's because we were never taught how to use our [00:02:00] minds effectively. We were never taught how to think. And there's a few reasons for that.
The Impact of Education and Environment on Our Beliefs
Number one is our education. If you think about the education you have the education that most people have. You don't learn how to think. You learn how to memorize facts. You're taught to get good grades on tests. Get really good SAT scores. get into a good college so you can get a good job. And you're kind of put down this track at a very young age. But how many classes did you have as you went through school, including college, where you were actually taught how to think. And use your mind. And understand what's going on inside you and how to understand your emotions and why you do the things you do.
I don't know about you, but I didn't have one class like that. So what happens is we go to school for all these years and we learn a bunch of stuff that's mostly useless to us. That doesn't really help us deal with life. And we get out into the real world and we start wanting to live our life and do things, and we're really totally unequipped to handle things.
And worse on top of the, you know, crappy [00:03:00] education that we all get when we're growing up. Is we're total lot of negative or false things by the people around us.
This includes our parents, our teachers, our leaders, so-called experts that we may come across the media. All kinds of messages coming from all different places that tell us a lot of negative things about the world and about ourselves that then we, accept, we internalize. And we don't even know we're doing it because most of the beliefs that we form as we're growing up, we don't put in there consciously.
We don't sit down and think of where I'm going to believe this. I'm going to believe that. They just get in there based on our experiences and our conclusions based on those experiences. And, you know, the things that are around us that might influence us to believe in a certain way. And so we end up once we're an adult holding all this stuff in our mind, most of which we're not fully conscious of that are controlling us every day of our life.
They're creating our emotions. And these are the things that get in the way of us getting what we want.
How Limiting Beliefs Shape Our Reality
So the point of all this is, if you [00:04:00] don't know how to run and control your mind, it will run in control you. Your mind, which is your thoughts and beliefs, those create your emotions, your emotional experience of life come from your thoughts and your beliefs and how you perceive the world and how you perceive yourself. And those also lead to your actions and your behavior. And your actions and behaviors are what actually create your external reality. They create the job that you're in right now, how much money you make, the relationships that you have, who you're married to. How you deal with life. How confident you are. Pretty much everything that you have in your life right now came from all the things that were stored in your mind, and all the different beliefs that you hold.
And if you don't know how to run that, and you don't know how to access that, then you're kind of at the mercy of it.
And this is why. You know, so many people, they want certain things in their life. And yet they're having a hard time getting it. And this isn't even a matter of effort. This is a matter of us getting in [00:05:00] the way of ourselves because we hold certain beliefs in our mind that keep getting in our way.
Taking Control: The Path to Changing Your Life
So, where do you start with shifting this because the good news is you can change this. You can change all of this. I've done this. My clients have been able to do this. And, you know, there are obviously people out there achieving amazing things and I guarantee you have also achieved amazing things.
So we don't just acquire negative beliefs and disempowering beliefs. We have a mixture of these things. So, if you look in your life, I'm sure there's many things that you have done well, and that are succeeding at, and things are going well in certain areas. And then there's other areas where you're not, or maybe you're not doing well at all. Because we hold a lot of mixed ideas in our mind.
So you need to know that you're not starting from zero. You're just starting from wherever you're where you are right now. And then that can be changed and improved. And you can do that actually quite rapidly if you know how to do it. And that's one of the main things that I'm going to do with this podcast. So, where we're going to start today in this episode is
The Truth About Achieving the Impossible
I'm going to [00:06:00] tell you a few things that are all true and they're all quite amazing. First thing is everything in your life right now, you created it. Everything. That means. The job that you're in your level of success in your career. The quality of your relationships, who you're married to your friends. Your, your state of health, both your mental health and your physical health.
How much money you make and how much money you have in the bank. How happy you are.
Everything. Now you may not believe that, or maybe you believe it to some extent. You may not be aware of how that all works. . There are some exceptions to this you didn't create the situation that you were born into.
So it's true, if you do have a disease, let's say that you were born with, from your genetics. You didn't create that you're not responsible for being born with that. You weren't responsible for the political situation you were born into or the upbringing you had, or if you had a very difficult childhood and experienced trauma You're not responsible for that. But, what you are responsible for and what you do have [00:07:00] 100% control over is once you're an adult,
and usually even before then, you have a hundred percent control over what you do about those situations that you were born into. Everybody's born into different situations. And different challenges. And, those don't determine our future. Those don't determine whether we're successful or not. And there's just tons of examples.
I mean, I think, you know this, if you think about it, many people are born into poverty, they become rich. People experience major traumas when they're younger and they still thrive and become happy and achieve a lot of things in their life. People are limited physically and they do extraordinary things physically in their life. All you have to do is look at the people around you or maybe yourself. Things that you happened to be born with, or a situation that you were born with. Or you can look in history or you can look at, you know, successful people today. The evidence is overwhelming that despite being born with certain disadvantages
people can still overcome that and achieve extraordinary things. And many times those things make a people, a person [00:08:00] stronger. And better able achieve things because they had to learn how to adapt. They had to learn how to overcome, and that creates strength, and resilience and
resourcefulness.
Okay, so that's point number one. Everything in your life right now, you created it. And the most empowering thing about learning and accepting and embracing that truth is that because you created it, you can change it. You can improve it. You can erase all the things that are getting in your way right now and still get everything you want in your life.
No matter where you are in your life. Okay. Number two.
Identifying and Overcoming Blind Spots
We all have blind spots. Blind spots are limiting or false beliefs about yourself and what you're capable of, that you hold in your mind that you can't see and aren't aware of, but that stopped you from getting what you want. So I asked the question at the beginning, why do people not get what they want?
Well, this is the main reason is they hold ideas in their mind, which are false beliefs about themselves, that when they go after a goal, that conflicts [00:09:00] with the belief then they get in their own way. They can't get to that goal because inside their mind they're thinking I can't do it. I can't do it.
So for example, if you have had goals or you have a goal that you want to make a lot more money, let's see you say, oh, I'm going to make a million dollars in the next few years. And you've never come anywhere close to that, but you hold a limiting belief in your mind that, I'm not smart enough to make that much money or I'm not talented enough to become a millionaire. Or millionaires only become that way because they're lucky or they were born into certain opportunities I mean any of these limiting or false beliefs you will not reach the goal. And the insidious thing about blind spots is that you can't see them. The reason we're blind to them is that they're stored in our subconscious and our subconscious is where most, everything in our mind is held. consciously, all you can think about right now is, is like listening to the podcast and what's going on directly around you, that you're focused on. Everything else is in your mind, all your memories, all your beliefs, all your knowledge, everything is [00:10:00] stored in your subconscious. And once you acquire a certain belief, whether it's true, whether it's false, positive, negative, it gets stored in there and it becomes automatized.
This is how we develop habits by the way, , physical habits. But, we have habits in our thinking as well. And once they're in there, they're kind of under the surface. You're not fully aware of them unless you listen for them and you're very introspective , or if you know how to pull them out, and there are ways to do this, which, you know, I'll talk about in future episodes. But, what you need to know right now is that you have these things.
How do you know? Because if you continue to try to achieve something in your life, doesn't matter what it is. You're trying to achieve a goal or get something in your life. And you keep not getting it. You keep getting in your way. You keep failing. You keep stumbling. You feel like you're fighting with yourself? There's a blind spot there. There is a conflicting belief or a false limiting belief
that's getting in your way every single time. And those beliefs are what rule us and control us. So you have to know this. And then it's obviously important to [00:11:00] know how to reveal these blind spots, because you can definitely do that and you can change these beliefs.
And the good news is that these limiting and false beliefs, they're almost always BS.
They're just plain false. They're not true. The thing is the subconscious doesn't discern between what's true or false what's right or wrong. What's good or bad. It just accepts what you tell it. And you tell it, I believe this... and usually we form these beliefs when we're younger, you form a belief.
I believe this about myself. I'm not good at math. I'm not very talented. I'm uncoordinated. I mean a zillion different things like that, and the positive beliefs as well, not just negative ones. But then your subconscious, if you really believe that belief, the subconscious will accept it, it'll store it in your mind.
And it'll actually start generating emotions connected to those beliefs. And it just feels true. It becomes something in your mind and in your experience, well, this is true. I'm not good at these things, or I am good at these things. And because of those beliefs, it [00:12:00] limits you to the level of, of the belief. And it's kind of like a box that we create for ourselves. Now the good news again is that these can be changed quite easily because we're the ones who put them in there, whether you were aware of it or not you were the one who put it in there at some point. And they can be changed.
Realizing Your Potential for Incredible Achievements
The third thing that I want to tell you is that you have the potential in you, right now you have the potential to achieve the equivalent of the invention of the light bulb curing cancer, making a billion dollars, creating a great work of art, like the Mona Lisa or the statue of David, finding your dream romantic partner without compromising or settling. Achieving incredible health, whether that's losing a lot of weight, or curing or eliminating diseases, getting rid of depression or severe anxiety, et cetera. These are all considered incredible achievements. You could say these were all insane goals that people achieved.
Now most people don't believe they can achieve things at this level. They think that those kinds of [00:13:00] achievements at that level are reserved for people who are geniuses, people who are born with a crazy amount of talent. People who are just sort of special and different and this is like a very tiny, tiny percentage of people.
The Leonardo da Vinci's the Steve Jobs, you have the great athletes, the great scientists in history. Those people are different than me. They're geniuses. I'm just a normal, average, you know, or maybe I'm slightly above average person, therefore I'm limited on what I can achieve. And that is false. And I know again, you may not believe this right now, but that's just another limiting belief. Where does that come from?
A lot of times that comes from our education. That we're taught that there's a difference between people like Leonardo DaVinci or Steve jobs and us, the normal average person. But the difference is not that they were born geniuses, or born with some crazy amount of talent, the differences, the way that they learn to use their mind. And The way that they learned to think. And the confidence that they [00:14:00] had in their ability to think and use their mind to get whatever they wanted it to get.
And a really good resource to start chipping away at this belief of the genius or the, the person born with crazy talent, is the book Mastery by Robert Greene. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
What this book is about, is Robert Greene did in-depth research on the so-called geniuses from history and modern geniuses that are living today. People like Mozart, Leonardo Da Vinci. Benjamin Franklin. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and then people who are living today. And what he found is these people were not born geniuses. Or with just an amazing amount of talent. They followed a certain path. They did certain things that led them to be able to achieve these incredible things. And if we do, a similar type of thing we can achieve, genius level, quote, unquote genius level achievements in our life.
So I highly recommend that book.
If you are doubting this belief , and if you want to [00:15:00] start chipping away at it.
Personal Stories of Transformation and Success
And I want to give you a couple other examples here from my own life. of where. I held the limiting belief.
Of something that I couldn't achieve, that later I was able to turn that around and achieve the thing that I thought I couldn't achieve. So my wife and I, we used to love to go to Cabo San Lucas, which is in Mexico. And we used to love to go to this resort One time a year for a week. And it was beautiful and it was very relaxing and it was on the Pacific side of Cabo San Lucas, which is the side where like the, none of the tourists really go because the water's really rough. And we used to go to this resort. And at the resort, they had this amazing beach that went on for like a mile and a half.
It was really wide. And no one would walk on this beach because you couldn't swim in the, in the waves. It was too rough. And my wife and I would go on these walks. They would take, like, you know, a couple of hours just walking all the way down to the end of the beach and back. And we would talk about wouldn't it be amazing if we could live here?
Wouldn't it be amazing if we could own a home here or a vacation home? And [00:16:00] live here. And a few years after we started going, they started building these houses up on a hill, right above the beach, overlooking the water. And then we were really like, oh my God, wouldn't that be amazing if we could own one of those houses. And live on the beach and live in Cabo. And at the time, it was just a wonderful thought.
It created a great feeling. But we thought, nah, that's impossible. We can't afford it. . It was just a dream at that point. Now, why was it just a dream? Because we didn't believe at that point that we could actually do it. Our beliefs were limited. That we couldn't see. Or couldn't believe that we could figure out how to actually make that happen. And this is what happens to a lot of people.
They have a dream like this or something else where they, they think, oh man, wouldn't it be amazing if I could do this incredible thing. And there's this really good feeling that comes from it. And you just kind of think about it and imagine it.
And then you conclude no, I can't do it. It's unrealistic. and then you let it go. And then you just go back to your, to your life. Okay. Now what we want to happen here is you have a dream like that and [00:17:00] you think. Cool, how can I make that happen?
We want to get our beliefs to the point where anytime we have a dream that that seems massive or, or almost impossible that we immediately start to think.
Hmm. Could I actually achieve that? And so what happened was several years later, we had grown. We had achieved a lot of other things along the way. And we got to a point where, we thought about living in Cabo again, and this time, the idea seemed feasible.
We still had to figure out how we were going to do it, but we thought that would be amazing if we could live there or at least live there part of the year. And we figured out how to do it. And we were able to live in Cabo in this same resort community for four years, we lived there several months a year and we lived a couple other amazing places too at the same time. And how are we able to do that?
Well, we just expanded what we believed we could achieve. Because we grew over that period of time. And what I want to teach you in this podcast is how to do that much more rapidly, much more intentionally, that you could apply to your own life to be [00:18:00] able to shift your beliefs,
so you could start going after these things now, instead of waiting several years or just sort of waiting passively for it to happen. Another example is with one of my clients. So one of my specialty areas as a psychologist has been insomnia. And one thing I do is I have a program where I help people overcome insomnia. Insomnia is just difficulty sleeping, trouble, falling asleep, staying asleep. And I've had many clients in my program who have had insomnia for over 30 years. So almost most of their life they've had difficulty sleeping. And they come into the program, and they hold all these limiting beliefs about their ability to overcome it. They hold beliefs
like I'm an insomniac. I've never been a good sleeper. I was born this way. They've tried everything under the sun and they haven't been able to get past it. Usually because of the limiting belief, but also because they're doing the wrong things. But they are open. They haven't given up at that point, which is a key thing. Because they're coming to get some help. And then they're able to overcome it. . And I've seen them overcome that insomnia they had for 30 years and shift [00:19:00] their beliefs to not only believing they can, but knowing they can, because they actually do it.
The other example I'll give here is, I want you to just think about people you know, or even famous people. that have achieved massive success. Financially. Or in their career. And you know that these people are not crazy talented or geniuses. I mean, My wife and I all the time talk about how did this actor or this singer or this person become so successful when they don't really have much talent.
I'm sure you've noticed this before that there are people who have become massively successful and you look at them and you wonder how the hell did they get successful? I mean, it's understandable with certain people that are really talented. But with people who are not talented or don't seem to have anything special, how did they become so massively successful? And maybe, you know, some of these people in your own life.
And the reason those people are able to do it was because of their belief that they could do it. They had this ironclad belief that they could achieve, whatever it is [00:20:00] they've achieved. And because of that belief, they did it. And the belief isn't really even a belief at that point. It's a fact in their mind: this is what I'm going to do and there's no doubt that they're going to do it. So, what I wanted to do today mainly is just get you aware of why, if you've tried to go after goals, big goals, small goals in your life, and you didn't achieve them. Or you're going after something right now, and you're really struggling. This is why. And you need to be aware of that.
So you're not blind to it. And so, you know, it's not, you know, because you're a victim of your upbringing or your genes or any of that kind of stuff. But that it's just stuff in your mind, blind spots, beliefs, limiting thoughts that get in your way when you try to go after those things, or they even stop you from going after them in the first place, because you believe that you'll never get it, that you'll never achieve it.
Next Steps: Reflecting on Your Achievements and Potential
What I would suggest if you want to take an action step from this episode is to think about your own life and think about the things that you've achieved. That surprised or amazed you. Almost everybody has achieved something. And sometimes we [00:21:00] underestimate ourselves that we don't give ourselves credit.
So really this is a great exercise to do with a friend. Or your partner. Is to talk is to sit down and have a conversation. My wife and I have these amazing dinner conversations every night. And we talk about stuff like this. A lot of times other people will see you more clearly than you'll see yourself.
And you can ask your friend or your partner. What are the things that I've done that you know of that you think are pretty impressive or amazing or incredible? And then you could do the same thing for them. Because that's another really powerful piece of evidence that can support, oh yeah. I am able to achieve something incredible that maybe I thought at one point that I couldn't.
You want to start being aware of all these things. You're basically giving your mind alternative facts and evidence and information to start to undermine any limiting beliefs that you have, so you can see what's possible for yourself. Okay. So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show.
So you're notified every time a new episode comes out on Tuesdays and make sure to leave a review on apple podcast to let me know what you think about the show.
Thanks for listening to the Insane Goals podcast. You can find all the resources and links for this episode in the show notes at https://www.drorma.com/podcast. And remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want in life. No limits, no BS, and no excuses. I’ll see you next time.