The 7 Masks That Could Be Blocking Your Success Right Now

Healing all starts with unmasking our wounds

Whether it is financial healing, healing our self-esteem or healing broken relationships, we can’t achieve wholeness unless we first uncover what’s wrong and what’s causing our hurts.

“Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.” — C.S. Lewis

Life Coaching by Unmasking is a method I discovered in coaching where assistance is given to clients as they unmask their own blocks in life which keep them from achieving their true desires.

Unmasking usually happens in the following areas:

1. Masked wounds

Masked wounds are real wounds that exist but may have been so deeply covered, forgotten or ignored that they appear to be almost non-existent except for the fact that they do affect the client’s life.

These wounds may manifest in some form of defensiveness or fear.

Sometimes, it can be seen in decisions made which seem to be misaligned with the other areas of the client’s life. They often surface during problematic times or whenever a certain point of intimacy is reached with the client’s most important relationships.

Have you ever known people who tend to push others away just when they’re about to form true intimacy?

2. Masked gifts

Masked gifts are talents or skills of the client that remain to be tapped to live life to the fullest.

Years of criticism or of living in an unconducive environment may have buried such potential and the client was left to believe that he or she has no gift to share with others.

This often results in feelings of worthlessness, low self-esteem or lack of purpose in life.

The key is to find an opportunity to discover these gifts

Sometimes, people only need to take some lessons to begin realizing their full potential. Sometimes, all they need is but one person who could make them see how good they are at certain things like art, music or writing.

3. Masked dreams

Masked dreams are the true desires of one’s heart. These, however, may have been previously judged as unattainable, impractical or very difficult if not impossible to achieve. In the process, the client may have exchanged this true dream to other dreams. However, even after reaching that new dream, one still feels a lack of contentment or fulfillment, feeling as though something is wrong but one cannot clearly identify what it is.

This may also consist of thinking that another person’s dream is the client’s true dream. The process then includes unmasking which is the real dream and which are those that belong to the client’s loved ones.

Without unmasking one’s real dreams, one may feel a general lack of commitment and motivation towards achieving one’s present goals. Have you ever wondered why you seem to have no passion for things other people would devote their whole lives for?

Fortunate are those who somehow managed to end up doing what they truly desired deep within.

“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

4. Masked relationships

Masked relationships are relationships that may be very important at the moment for the client and may even seem to be the ideal thing, but for one reason or another is bound to fail or is already failing for reasons the client may not see or is afraid to see.

What are some of the things people fail to see or refuse to see?

• incompatible personalities
• loving an illusion of the person instead of the real one
• a partner has fallen in love with someone else
• a partner is not ready for commitment

5. Masked beliefs

Masked beliefs are those beliefs that the client truly has in one’s subconscious mind.

At the surface, the client may claim to believe that he loves himself and that this love should make room for his weaknesses. Deep within, he may lack compassion for himself and this may show in his perfectionism. He may truly believe that he needs to be perfect before he could be loved. This perfectionism may also affect his relationship with others when he cannot tolerate the mistakes of other people.

Is your true belief in contradiction to what you claim to believe?

6. Masked progress

Masked progress is being unaware of one’s true growth in a certain area in life. For example, people may believe that they have already gained self-confidence, but in reality, they have merely relied upon some external things like job status or money to which their self-confidence was attached.

On the other hand, some people may have achieved a certain level of maturity in life, but certain difficulties they’ve recently encountered may lead them to think they’ve learned nothing.

People fail to notice that growth is often a growth in spirals. Setbacks may be experienced now and then but that doesn’t mean progress was never made.

7. Masked fears

Masked fears are those that keep us from achieving many of our goals in life. One example is the fear of success that may sabotage all our efforts toward reaching our ambitions.

Other fears which the client may not be aware of are:

• the fear of intimacy
• the fear of being rejected
• the fear of being alone
• the fear of not being good enough

Final thoughts

It’s not easy removing our masks. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’re wearing one. Years of repressing our dreams, our hurts or our many other frustrations have unknowingly buried our true selves within layers of defense which we can’t identify or remove any more.

But unless we do so, we’d fail to understand why despite our outward success, we still feel a certain emptiness deep within us. Unless we do, we may fail to know our true strength, our true beauty, and our true gifts.

It is only by unmasking our pain that we can find the wounds beneath the mask, and it is only by finding those wounds that our healing could ever begin. May you find your way to healing. May you find your way to joy!

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” — Kahlil Gibran