Daily Quote: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” NelsonMandela
Have you spent some time examining your thinking and emotions when you are going through a particularly scary experience. What are your thoughts and what are you imagining will be happening to you by the end of this period that you are viewing with such fear?
It’s often quite difficult to pinpoint why we are so scared. We look at the task we need to perform and cannot work out why we are so fearful. Something as very basic as walking into a shop to try and get directions to somewhere makes us break out into a sweat.
Or what about phoning up a helpline and wanting to complain because of the shoddy service you’ve just received. How many of you have had the courage to send back a dinner at a restaurant that you thought was bad? Have you ever sent the wine back?
What about applying for a new job or changing careers and going to night school to requalify. All these could be exciting new adventures in your life. Instead they can end up being truly frightening and scary experiences.
What is making you imagine these events to be so frightening to you? That’s most often the point. You are imagining a fearful conclusion to your adventure. You are worried that the end result of your activity will lead to something scary.
In most cases that scary event or happening is that you make a fool of yourself. People will laugh at you because you have made a mistake. You don’t want to ask for directions when you are lost because you worry people will laugh at you that you can’t read a map.
You don’t want to send your food or wine back in the restaurant because you don’t want people to point fingers at you that you don’t know what good food or a good glass of wine is about.
When you are considering a new career you hesitate because you are ok in the existing job. After all what would happen if you failed your evening course? Or even if you passed your evening course and then you end up not being able to find a new job within that new discipline. Wouldn’t people laugh at you for spending all that money and not achieving the expected outcome?
Our vision of ourselves as infallible, perfect beings who are not allowed to make mistakes is often what holds us back. More than anything else we fear the criticism of other people. We worry about what they will think about us if we fail. We can’t cope with the idea of people possibly laughing at us.
In these cases, where we have this vague kind of fear that we can’t actually identify in the first place, we often also have no idea who the ‘people’ are who will laugh at us. We sometimes have to resort to imagining dead people laughing at us because we can’t come up with any names of live ones.
That’s right. We imagine our dead parents still shaking their heads at us for trying something new. We still hear their voices telling us that a job in music won’t pay the bills or that being an accountant is the right career choice, even if we hate going to work.
Our imagination often leads us down the wrong paths. We allow our fear of failure and ridicule to dictate our future happiness. It can stop us from trying out new experiences and living our life to the fullest.
The worst part is that more often than not, our fears are totally unfounded. Nobody is going to laugh. In fact they will applaud you for your courage of trying something new.
