Double Trouble

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell

Doubt and Fear, you rarely find one without the other. One of the biggest problems they create is they seem to paralyze their victims from head to toe. Once they set their hooks in you, it becomes seemingly impossible to get anything done. Fear creates doubt and doubt creates new fears, a vicious circle emerges, and it keeps growing as it feeds on itself resulting in withdrawal from taking appropriate action to resolves the uncertain situation, or to putting them off proving the Spanish proverb to be true: Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week."

Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop. According to Les Brown: “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears”; doing so leads to a mediocre life at best. Getting what you want in life dictates that you relinquish the child-like attitude of being scared of the dark, light a torch and find your way through it (There are no real monsters by the way,.. just in case).

You can turn your fears into even high octane fuel once you realize that fear is only an emotion, and the emotions can be controlled and tamed. The key is to get the emotions working for you, not against you. Creating a better version of yourself requires you to step into unknown territories. While fear will hook up your senses and get you in an alert state to help you navigate the uncertainty, it can, if left unchecked run out of control and send powerful signals through your body and mind, holding you down in the process.

The common learning we get while coaching clients around fear is the realization that the only way to overcome fear and tame it is to face it head on. With the curiosity to learn from and adapt to the many new uncertainties, understanding them, and making them familiar and hence more certain; certainty is what abolishes fear altogether.

While failing can feel hurtful with a hint os shame, it is never fatal or final, refusing to give your best shot is a sure way to end any attempt at change. What one of the best reframes of failure is that it is only feedback on your last attempt, what you need to do is learn what worked and what not and start over, more intelligently this time, increasing your chances of success with each adjusted attempt. Another way is to look at failing as a necessary "growing pain” like the teething pain that will give you powerful jaws when it subsidies.

Staying in the comfort of our familiarity is not only a waste of potential, but it is also futile to waste a life of exploring how to fulfill your potential to hide in the relative safety of the known. What is dangerously overlooked from this formula is that life, society, and people are ever evolving, failing to adapt to that evolution by evolving oneself up to par, is a sure way towards extinction, that of your dreams in this instance. You wouldn't want that, would you?

One way to conquer fear is to use it against itself, since you are good at getting fearful, imagine a more dreadful scenario that is bound to happen in the case which you do not take action today. Add to it the images and feelings of the worst imagined outcomes and get the induced fear to steer you away from that result and to drive you to avoid it at any cost, including the cost that you refused to pay to take action in the first place. How much pain have you and your family already endured because you lacked the courage to take a chance and give it your best shot? How much more pain are you willing to suffer by continuing to allow fear and procrastination to rule your life? See what you see there, hear what you are hearing, and feel the feeling and let it weigh in very hard. When the perceived future scenario gets too scary, ask yourself how you can avert such a disastrous situation? What would happen if you did give it a decent shot, starting with few baby steps today? Will that give you a little reassurance? Good, now take a few of these steps, you will stumble and fall, that is for granted. Remember if you would, the actual baby steps you took when you learned how to walk, did you give up after the first few failed attempts? Of course, you didn’t, did you? How about applying the same toddler strategy as an adult, it could work, couldn’t it?