I had this idea, as we are setting our goals... and we do our (unconscious) best to keep them as realistic and achievable as possible, for multiple reasons..., we might be anxious to face disappointment, we might tell ourselves that we cannot reach for more as it would be a too much to stretch for, and too small of a return of our invested time and energy, or we have that ugly fear of not being enough (making a bad investment and losing the family money, making the wrong decision that now invites criticism and anxiety into your life, ...)
So we continue to play down our dreams, we start convincing ourselves that our dreams are not really that important, that we should focus on more realistic or achievable ones. This is also good for our sense of self-worth. It is a protection mechanism that protects or fragile Ego from being confronted with disappointment. We must also understand that this brings us nothing, except for the same old circumstances that we are claiming that we want to escape. But do we? Do we really ?
For sure you know as well as I do that nothing will come out of closing yourself off from the world and always engaging into activities that are familiar and safe. Nothing will come out of same set of behaviors that are being triggered by the same pattern of thought.
We can only do our best, at any given time! We should remember this. Learning to accept our decisional process plays a major role in how we engage with the world. Sometimes, more often than we would like to admit, we let ourselves being dictated by or emotions, we take decisions that makes us feel good, safe and comfortable, or we let us being moved by behaviors that are being a direct result of a set of distorted thought patterns. I will not get into all that here, but I will tell you that whatever the case may be, there is a way to skip all that might be sabotaging you, and apply a simple frame of questioning that you may find quite eye-opening, to say the least.
Whenever you face taking a decision that has a potential impact in your life, and you are unsure about it, there is a frame of questioning that stretches your mind to explore a variety of options that might have previously been hidden to you.
Write down your answers. Give it real thought and leave emotions out of it. The gut feeling is mind triggered as a result of a thought that activates a feeling linked to a memory or a piece of a memory that has been re-implanted as the years have passed from the innitial trigger.
You might be face with the decision to change the job. You get through the questioning framework, you have your appropriate answers, but at some point you have all these emotions rising up, your feelings are stirring up, you become anxious, your palms are getting sweaty, your heartbeat is accelerating and your gut is stretching... anxiety and fear, that are being triggered by the thought you gave to the matter, but that also activated an old memory of an event when change was not the best for you, for example from the 2nd to the 3rd grade as the learning became increasingly difficult, or moving to a new city and having to leave your friends behind..., all those times when change triggered loss, sorrow, anxiety, loneliness...
The result of this emotion is not convincing yourself that the reasons for changing your job are not really that pertinent, there is no real need to make the move, or perhaps not the right time, and so on... now we are sabotaging ourselves into believing that we do not actually need to change our jobs. We do not have to face again that fear that we once felt. it could be fear of the unknown, of not being good enough.
Now, there are a few techniques that we may use in order to ensure a very low emotion 'pollution' of our questioning framework, and you can do this right before doing your best to answer the qestions:
I hope this helps.