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“Be your superhero, defeat all little monsters on a road to your dream, be your life.”

(TE Sivann)

You may have watched a lot of Hollywood movies regarding the superhero like Superman, Spiderman, Batman, and The Avengers. Or, I just remembered about our childhood cartoon and movies such as the Sailor Moon, the Polin Pig, Red & Black Ant Men, Power Rangers, and others. In all of these movies, we can see that the characters of the superhero, they created all their legends by defeating all the monsters on the way they’re growing to make their dream a reality.

And, another great example is the Lion King cartoon. The little lion, he’s also growing up from the defeating of fears which were the little monsters in his mind and growing as the way of the leaders did. Though, we are a normal human being. Still, there are many little monsters in our life that are the barriers to our success, which I called the ‘Cherry Monsters’, because they’re small and we may not pay attention to or ignore and let them grow bigger and bigger to struck our dream. We are here to recognize all of the ‘Cherry Monsters’ that can ruin our dreams and life than to find the way to defeat all of them, so we can be our life and make our dreams a reality.

Let’s get started to know your ‘Cherry Monsters’ in life and “be your superhero, defeat all little monsters on a road to your dream, be your life.”

‘Cherry Monster #1’ – Procrastination

This monster procrastinates all your main tasks which delay all your processes and ruin your quality of work. The tasks that can complete within a day were delayed to a week, a work that can complete within a week you make it a month or even more, and its outcome also not that really qualified as the normal performance result of the others. So, let’s see how a procrastinated person complete a task.

For example, CM1, he is a graphic designer. He had got a logo design project from his friend, one day from the beginning of the week. He felt it’s too easy, it’s just a logo, as his sharp skill in Illustrator there was just a small thing by stretch only a few hours was enough in his thought. The client needed it by earlier of the end of the week because they had a meeting for discussion regard to the logo on Friday day afternoon.

It spent a whole morning about the meeting for this logo project already and he decided to start his sketching the logo this afternoon after his lunch and heading back to the office. In the office, he was supposed to start the design, yet he had refreshed his email and saw a new mail to read. Then he opened Facebook and wanted to refresh his mind and idea. By scrolling and surfing the net, his whole noon was spent. “Yeah, it’s OK! The deadline is Friday morning, I still have time, let’s finish it up tomorrow.” The next day, in front of his desk, he looked and read his memo with the notes about what he had discussed with the client about their logo. But he had spent a whole morning to read and it’s seemed to be concentrated on his desk without moving, and continued in the afternoon he was sketching something, with some shapes, curves, but not yet a logo. He was still looking on his computer and the notes until the day finished.

Wednesday, of course, he had in mind to complete the design within today. Unfortunately, he’s still in the procrastinating of finding more ideas than the starting sketch work on the logo. Time continued to Thursday, in the morning there was a regulation meeting of his internal team, and usually, it took only 30 minutes to finish up the team follow up meeting, but today the whole morning was consumed, and his time became shorten. In the afternoon, he had committed himself to complete the design. However, the structure of the logo just created and it was until the late evening. Gradually, he spent a rush effort in another few hours the next morning, Friday morning to complete the logo, styles, and color choice. Rashly, with work that really needed more hours to go but it’s hastily submitted to the client on that Friday morning!

By this story, you could imagine how good the performance of the CM1 is, isn’t it? It did not just delay all the main processes of the whole work, but it also ruins the final quality of the outcome you have work on. To cope with this monster, you may find in other articles about Procrastination or go direct to simple ways to cope with procrastination. And, I would love to suggest two books for further reading as follows.

• Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now
• Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Let’s move to the next monster!

‘Cherry Monster #2’ – Perfectionism

This monster looks pretty perfect, but its perfectionism makes you pursuing greatness and never be perfect so that it may ruin your energy, reduce your resources, and limit your time. You will never uncover your potential inside to be what you want to be and realize your dreams.

For example, CM2, she is a project manager and she leads a team to design a proposal and budget plan to donors for bidding and also involving in the projects implementation. She is among her family, friends, and colleagues. During her study, she was an outstanding student and had many achievements along the way she grew up which made her very proud of herself even at the work as the promoted team leader, the project manager.

She worked hard to be excellent every task or a project, because of the perfectionism she required to her team or even herself. However, perfectionism made her pursuing the greatness that never ends to consume all her energy, resources, time, and people around her. To make a successful proposal for a project, she always requires very strict to herself and the team to accomplish the tasks. Besides completing the tasks, what she needs the most is a good evaluation. So she spent more time working on collecting a lot of information and resources in order to make sure whether it is enough for every stage of the project.

However, the more information and resources she and her team collected, the requirement for herself and the team is upgraded to another level. It looked so perfect, it still made people mistakes, and the possible level of the requirement was not so matched to the team capacity. The time, cost, quality, material, people, and so many points to be considered were overloaded due to too many criteria of the resources and the work requirement level up and up. To do so every time to get another new project, she and her team always felt that the time was very limited, they always had no enough time to accomplish a single task or project. And, she felt tired and tire, and very disappointed with everything not fit to what she wanted to achieve. Those perfections almost not adapted to her mind.

Have you ever been in those situations or met someone familiar to her? Yes, of course, no one is perfect in the world and everyone will make a mistake so don’t try yourself to be too perfect. To cope with this monster, you may find in other articles about Perfectionism. Or, there are two things to remember. One is don’t be afraid of making a mistake or fear of failure. And other is no one is perfect, please don’t give too much demand on yourself to the highest level achievement. In addition, you may find the following two books for further reading.

• Perfectionism: A Practical Guide to Managing “Never Good Enough”
• When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough: Strategies for Coping with Perfectionism

Now, let’s move to another monster!

‘Cherry Monster #3’ – Don’t Know How to ‘say no to‘

This monster will waste all of your time on the worse things by the huge request for everything that might be very useless to you. So, you have to try to learn how to ‘say no’ to all wasted things which not really mean to you, your dreams, your life, and your success.

CM3, he is a kind person. And, everyone in the company always asks him to do miscellaneous things included run errands. When everyone met him even from the morning till afternoon, they may ask, “May you bring these documents to the self?”, “Can you help me to read and translate this email or announcement since I am not so good in English?”, “May you buy me and everyone cups of coffee at lunchtime when you head back from lunch?”, “The water is empty not may you put another bottle in?”, “When you have a break may you go to downstair buy so snack for us?”, “My table seems broken, can you help me to fix it since I have another job to go outside right now?”, “Can you help me to bring this document to the boss for a sign?” And, so many requests that out of the scope of his work as an HR office of the company, and he never ‘say no to’ all of them.

As the HR work, he has to concentrate on the evaluation and monitoring every staff performance, especially at the end of the month, quarter, and the semester. But, in his daily work, most requests from the others to do this and that, so how can he do or effort the best on his job. You may be in this kind of situation or one of your friends is like that, he or she always care about the feeling of others, and always help others, especially, they are hard to reject every request from friends or people they know. So, it may cause them a habit of difficult to ‘say no to’ other people as follows.

If I reject doing this for my boss, I may face some difficulty to work what he in the job next.
If I reject to do that for my colleagues, they may gossip me for any of my mistakes.
If I reject to do something as per requested from friends, I may lose the maintaining relationship with them.

And, something like that. In fact, this habit may ruin yourself by the time when there are many miscellaneous requested from others and you have no time to do your job and what you want in the future, or maybe what you do just for the others’ but not your dream. So you have to understand that clearer and try to get rid of this habit. Let’s get started to ‘say no to’ from the next request. Then you also read articles that help you catch in further understand and how to cope with this, and there are say no to is a way of building self-confidence and four simple ways to say no to.

Next, let’s move to know another monster!

‘Cherry Monster #4’ – Brief Period of Enthusiasm

This monster will give you only a short period of enthusiasm for doing something. It might be just a minute or at least as long as the 3 minutes ONLY in doing the thing. Then the rest hours you’re not the intention of interesting in doing so, which is changing rapidly and you will be having done for nothing during the day.

CM4, she is an enthusiastic young lady, who has a strong passion for everything just from the beginning, especially for seeking new hobbies. However, she may change her interests or hobbies twice a month. For example, study a new language, learning guitar, cooking, painting, yoga, gym, and so many kinds of things, eventually changing every month. And, the longest thing or hobby she can stand on is not more than three weeks.

Once, she was interested in studying Japanese. She had spent a lot of effort and budget on registering the Japanese part-time course. At first, she was in the class, she tried very hard to study and remembered about the phrases and some useful vocabulary. When she was in her daily work she also tried to speak out those words to her colleagues. But, it had been for two weeks she was in the class. By Friday evening of the second week, it’s her cousin’s birthday, so that she had missed the class to join the party. Then next week’s class she started boring with it. Next, she felt tired, sleepy, boring, difficult to go to the class, and also the very bad traffic in the evening. Finally, she decided to leave the class.

However, soon the next day, she had seen on Instagram about the beautiful pictures and videos of the foods from Tasty and other cooking pages. Then she started to love cooking. Immediately, she searched on the internet about so many ingredients, cooking methods, and various kinds of cooking materials with a plan to make her own meal for the next day. In the next days, she went to the market and bought all the things she would love for the cooking. She was spending a whole day on Saturday to prepare all of those things and a lot of money in order to prepare for her meal in the evening. But she was not, her dinner was dining out at the restaurant with her friends, and she started to hate cooking again.

So, I do not describe her, CM4 any more regarding another hobby of her like playing guitar or yoga, so that you can imagine her already, I think. Nowadays, there are so many young people like her with a brief period of enthusiasm. They are really enthusiastic young generations, I think, but they still young to uphold a thing to do for a long period of time to their success. It’s for young people to obtain many things in their passion and commitment, but they should not just have it only in a short period in the beginning. Actually, in this situation, a brief period of enthusiasm mind might be caused by a lack of motivation or a clear direction such as the way to follow the dreams and goals of life. Once we figure out what is the root cause of it was about, we are sure to get rid of this habit.

Thus, have you ever been in those situations or met someone familiar to her? Now, you have cleared and understood about this monster. To cope with this monster, you may find in another article about Enthusiasm or go direct to read how to manage and persistent your enthusiasm for doing a single thing, and another 5 ways to cope with a brief period of enthusiasm.

Next, let’s move to another one.

‘Cherry Monster #5’ – The Distracted Mind

This monster distracted your mind and attacked your concentration, you will lose focus on doing something or accomplishing the tasks. It’s more likely to the situation you may feel want to read a book but it’s just read about few lines then you stuck on to drop the book down even you still want to read it. Sometimes, you may open your computer and want to do the work but you don’t know why just a minute you start feeling bored with it though you intended to finish the task earlier.

It’s quite similar to CM5, he is that kind of person. And he is a loyal fan of technology. He follows every latest update of the technology, even the new devices, software, or especially the game. Though, he knows a lot about the latest things in technology and tries something new for most of his favorites. It’s too many things to him to catch up and it’s just a period of time when he feels dislike about that he will try another new thing instead of one to another. Thus, it’s good to have a lot of ideas and what new he wanted to do, yet he just kept it in his thinking and he cannot select one from all of the ideas to accomplish a complete thought about doing something. Finally, it caused him the distracted mind of what new things or ideas to do, and lost focus on doing his way to his dreams.

We are living in the information age, meanwhile, there are many and many kinds of things that can make us distracted with the dynamical platform, especially the advertisement techniques related to how our mind or psychological process is cared for or attracted about. When we are attracted by many kinds of things to our interest, so it’s easy to cause our distractibility to accomplish a complete task. Even that is the simple way of business advertisement to promote the product or service and as the daily habit to customers perception,  but if we are in touch with this for a long time, I mean if we are being in the kind of influence, we may get rid of our long term habit or task, such as reading a book, learning a new language, doing an excise, and our dreams or life goal will seem not really the things mean to us at all.

The one who obtains this kind of distractibility he or she has a lot of new ideas and wider knowledge but low productivity and it’s very hard to stay focus to accomplish a complete task at hand. So, distractibility also the ‘cherry monster’ that we have to defeat on the road to achieve our dreams and live our ideal life. To cope with this monster, please try to focus here and now, and you may find in another article about the distracted mind. Or, there’re 9 simple things to control your day from the distraction, and let’s get started to deal with the distractibility and keep staying focus on.

Next, let’s move to another one.

‘Cherry Monster #6’ – Too Believe in Shortcut Path to Success

This monster makes you think all the things are easy accomplishment, because everything made with a shortcut formula, a shortcut way to get the success. However, there is no such thing as something that happened to be shortcut as we think it’s so easy after we found the shortcut for the thing, actually not. Every success struggles, every challenge needs effort, and the only real practice makes perfect.

At my time, there were many fresh graduates from college try to ask teachers or seniors about is there any shortcut path to success and then the very freshmen in the career or business like them can be quicken of the success. For example, CM6, she was a fresh graduate student and she is very interesting to own her business for her future goal. But she was wondering how she can succeed this goal as she was the fresh graduate and still in a limit level of knowledge, skills, and experience, especially, the successful business is about. She was very passionate about the quick path to success. She tried to ask some questions to her and someone she knew for the answer like that, what she has to do first after the graduation, go direct to startup or try in a very specific and related career to gain some experiences, and then startup the business at next? She asked many people about this question. 

In this case question, it’s just an assumption question. Actually, which way she chooses is a good path for her to be a success. But the matter is how she does in each way she goes. And get rid of the “shortcut path” mind that she can jump from one another stage quicker without any effort. That’s is impossible. Due to this question, the “shortcut path” in every person’s mind can ruin them to do more things for their goals by just spend most of all the time seeking for the path, and waste their future. 

Have you ever been in this kind of mindset, or feel want to achieve something quickly and try to find the formula for that success? Yes, of course, everyone may have this, but don’t be too believe. The success is struggling and needs a huge effort to contribute your time and resource for it. Here, is some articles reflect the shortcut path to success or may help you to cope with this mind to find your success formula by doing the real action yourself.

‘Cherry Monster #7’ – No Self-confidence

This monster created yourself, enemy, it hid yourself from you, the ‘real’ YOU, who is energetic and full of potential, but it’s invisible since you’re not founded yourself accurately the ‘real’ one. Clearly understand yourself who you are and what you want, which means finding yourself and get back all your self-confidence.

In this case, I believe that it may concern two kinds of conditions. One is the person quite similar to CM6 who is fresh graduate and very fresh in the field, and about knowledge, skill, and experience is not enough to give her a stand-in any specific field. And, other is even he had knowledge, skill, and experience in the particular work for a period of time or longer, he still had no confidence in himself to stand out independently, for example, as I can him CM7. 

He is the kind of person who may know everything, because of his wider knowledge, experiences, and has a try to do something new to him, but he has no that confidence for himself to make it happened or shows to the public. He’s afraid to stand in the front of the group, and he feels lose to do a thing he has knowledge and skill in. In order to stand out to the front, and try himself to do the thing, he always spends a long time to cope it and makes him dare not and no motivation from time to time of facing such this situation. So, all of these feelings may be interacting in his mind as I will mention in the next “Cherry Monster #N”, the other miscellaneous feelings in the rest of this article.

For the first one, just keep yourself improving and develop your knowledge and skill to meet the field required to gain more experience so that your confidence can be built. However, for the other, it may need time and more effort to struggle yourself and exploring your real inside is about as I have mentioned in an article, A Brief Guide to Discover the ‘Real’ YOU.

‘Cherry Monster #N’ – Others Miscellaneous Feelings

Regarding yourself, a basic or foundation of doing something that means to your life and lives your way well-being, and to reach the final goal of your life. You may feel yourself worse or depress sometimes when you may say to yourself as to several situations as follows. 

“I doubt my skills”, you have learned about that before but I am not sure I can do it well or not, or whether you doubt your skills to accomplish a thing, daily task, or even in your job. When this situation is happened to you, in which it may cause you to feel or afraid of the failure with your word like, “I may fail”. Actually, you are not yet in the doing, but you have already felt to be lost with your minor mind, or maybe ready to fail in reality because of this feeling. 

Sometimes, you may feel that you’re in an unstable situation such as at work, living, or accomplish a task. It’s not just for your career, but it also happens in your daily activity or a part of your life that you may say to yourself like this, “I need to feel secure.” It may be concerned about your scary mind when you are in a position of your career or work with other people in a team but you want to need more knowledge, skill, and experiences to fulfill yourself in a particular area of work or task.

Next, when you are accomplishing a thing as the usual way you have done or experienced before you may feel good at it. However, once there is a change on the regular tasks you have used to or your routine, then you may say that “changing the way of doing is not easy,” which is a sign of the change you may not adapt to or you raise to yourself to prevent something clear to yourself and it may cause the fault in the future. Of course, most of the people afraid to change or think that stay still is easier and more beneficial to them. In contrast, they don’t care about the improvement, the change, that will make them more benefits than the previous system. So, it might cause you in another fix mindset of hating change, and slow down your personal and career development as well.  

Last but not least, you may adapt to your daily work even there are many things to do or sometimes overloaded. However, planning, scheduling, prioritizing your tasks with a concise action plan, it helps you a lot to manage your day magic happen. Before saying this, you may fetch with the word, “I have too many things to do,” every day, maybe. You know, and have heard about that all the time, and want to do so, planning, scheduling, and prioritizing. Though how hard you try to arrange your plan, it gave you a result of “I have too many things to do” in my daily work, and I can manage it well. 

These miscellaneous feelings even it looks small to your personal life, it’s subtle things that may ruin your big dream. Put altogether of another “Cherry Monsters”, it will be another big enemy to yourself and your life. If you still let them alive, you may sleep in your nightmare every night. Even you dream it big tonight, the next you get up and the same thing happens to you which not mean to you or make your days. 

Once you have defeated all these monsters from your life, your day will be wonderful and you can have more things done incredibly. Let’s get started to know your ‘Cherry Monsters’ in life and “be your superhero, defeat all little monsters on a road to your dream, be your life.”