July 13, 2009 | 4:07 pm

What’s Holding You Back?

Posted by Misha Henckel

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Misha Henckel is a Los Angeles-based personal and executive life coach. Her executive clients are generally leaders of entertainment and media companies who are focused on re-inventing themselves and re-envisioning their organizations. She is founder of Life Mastery Circles, a workshop series for women, and is co-founding a new organization for empowering and developing women leaders. She can be reached at www.mishahenckel.com or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

We are inclined to believe that our dreams far exceed what we can actually achieve. In fact, we’ve been trained to expect and plan for the worst. As children, our eyes sparkled with wonderment at the great possibilities that lay before us, until that was slowly whittled away by the forces that be.

What I’ve found is that we shoot for far less than what we are capable of. We are afraid of ourselves, of who we really are. And so we spend our lives avoiding, deleting, or misinterpreting the promptings of our hearts. To do that is very human. We are afraid of greatness, of stepping beyond the confines of “normal” and of shining brilliantly. It is rather scary to be great… great at anything.

The exciting thing about these turbulent days is that with everything quite upside-down, it’s become the safest of times to step out of our boxes and follow those long-denied promptings of our heart of hearts. So why not give it go?

Email me with your questions .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)and I’ll be happy to respond. Answers will be anonymously posted to the blog.