You know what it means to get in your own way, don’t you? It is a true phenomenon.

Try to picture this: I’m walking down the street and then I run into myself… how can I run into myself unless I’m divided in such a way that in any given moment I’m on my way to do what something in me says is going to make the moment right, then I run into what the moment says will make it right… and I have a crash?

Here’s a little story to illustrate this idea of getting in our own way: A new person comes onto the job at a construction site near to a public park. The responsibility of the site foreman is to see that everybody is doing the right thing and in the right way. At about 8:30 in the morning, the foreman hears a banging sound, and he sees in a corner this new worker, hammering something.

Forty-five minutes later, the foreman comes out with his cup of coffee and sees that the young man is still banging on something. Now the foreman knows this can’t possibly be right. How can you bang on something for forty-five straight minutes? Putting nails into forms can’t possibly take that long.

So the foreman walks over, and what he sees is that the boy is using the reverse side of a screwdriver. He is actually holding onto the metal, and he’s banging on the nail, trying to put it into the form with the wood end of a screwdriver.

The foreman says to the worker, “Son, what are you doing? You can’t drive a nail into a form with the wood end of a screwdriver! Where is your hammer?”

The boy says, “Well, I left it in my car.”

“Then why don’t you go get your hammer, so you can do this job right?”

“It would take too long to go get it.”

The lesson here is that you must use the right tool for the right job! You don’t know yet what the right tool is for the moments where you run into something, where what you have built in your life starts to fall apart. Instead, you are handed — by a part of you that you don’t know yet — a tool that can’t work.

Start to bring an end to the pain of being in your own way by realizing that your mind cannot fix what is wrong with your heart!