Set Yourself Free -- Let Go of the Dead Weight In Your Life Taking time to separate the good from the toxic people and habits in your life will help launch you to where you want to be.
By Matt Mayberry Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There is no better feeling than setting yourself free and eliminating all of the dead weight from your life. I can go on and on telling you about all of the extremely talented athletes that I have either played with or have seen throw all of their potential right down the drain -- all because of the dead weight that consumed their life.
Related: 8 Toxic Types of People You Should Keep Out of Your Life
When I refer to dead weight, I am referring to toxic and negative relationships that bring hardly any value or significance to your life. All of the negative and time-consuming habits that play virtually no role in helping you get to where you want to go. Environments that encourage you to stay right where you are while never stepping a foot out of your comfort zone.
Dead weight can come in all shapes, sizes and forms. To make it easy, dead weight is anything that holds you down in life and prevents you from moving forward and making daily progress.
It's impossible to live an extraordinary life and achieve your goals and dreams with any sort of dead weight in your life. I encourage you to, once a month -- preferably once a week -- take the time to analyze your life, and see if there is any dead weight that can be cut out immediately.
An exercise to help remove the dead weight in your relationships
This exercise has helped me tremendously in the past when I was looking for a change. I was in a major rut and couldn't find out what the problem was. Without knowing how much this exercise would benefit my life, I took out a sheet of paper and put a big letter Y on the top left hand corner of the paper and an N on the top right hand corner. I started with my relationships.
I began to think of everyone that I talk to often whether on the phone or in person and asked myself if they help me get to where I want to go or hold me back. If they added value to my life, I wrote their name down under the Y category. If they were negative and seemed to always have something discouraging to say, they would go underneath the N category. Y stood for yes and N stood for no.
After 15 minutes passed by, I couldn't believe what I began to see. My N category was clearly getting longer than what I had for the Y category. It all of a sudden hit me that no wonder I wasn't happy with the results I was getting up to that point in my life. I had an enormous amount of dead weight in my personal relationships that was drastically holding me back from moving forward to achieve the success that I deeply desired. This simple exercise really clarified that for me.
Related: 8 Ways to Not Only Survive But Prosper Around Negative People
Apply the same exercise for your habits.
I applied the same exercise for all of my daily habits and again, I was completely shocked at what I saw. I couldn't believe all of the things that I was doing on a daily basis that added no value to my life what so ever. Not only were my relationships garbage and holding me back, but my habits were also an added source of dead weight that was making it virtually impossible to advance my life forward.
By taking the time to analyze your habits and place them into a category to see whether they are adding value to your life or sabotaging your success can be an absolute game-changer for you. The things we do on a daily basis ultimately determine our destiny. Just as there can be dead weight in our personal relationships, there can be dead weight in our habits and the things we do daily as well.
Most people don't even take the time to analyze their lives, let alone make the change to remove all of the dead weight that has interfered with them reaching their full potential. Setting yourself free from all of the garbage in your life, the bad habits and the toxic relationships is one of the best feelings in the world. You not only will be doing your happiness and peace of mind a huge favor, but you will also in an instant begin to increase your success rate.
Related: Do You Have Toxic People in Your Life That Are Limiting Your Potential?
