Giving Yourself Permission to Soar.
Do you ever get scared of what you can do? I don’t mean that in a bad sense, because we all have the shadows in our souls that can imagine the things that no one should imagine.
I’m talking about when you realize that you are good at something, in a way that would really go somewhere and lead you to the land of your dreams.
My guess is that you have felt that a few times in your life, because we all have something we are good at.
But so many of us never act on our particular level of ability. That’s what makes people who do things stand out from the crowd, because so many of us know what we could do, understand what we could be great at, but we hold ourselves back because the possibility of becoming something more than we currently feel can be too scary.
We often fear going for it more than we believe in the success we could have.
And I’ve been trying to understand recently just where that reluctance comes from, because I suffer with it just as much as everyone else seems to. In examining my own feelings, and trying to go deeper into my soul, I’ve come to understand that there are several fears involved in my holding back, and I figured I’d share them to see if somehow you it might help you.
Because we are as similar in our fears as we are in our dreams, but we rarely talk about our fears at a deep personal level, out of a desire not to be seen as broken or weak.
So the first fear that’s stopping me is the fear of failing, and how others will think of me. Over the years the opinions of others has come to mean less to me, but I still have a long way to go on my journey, so the fear of others laughing at my failings is a concern.
Funnily enough, the more I try things, the less the opinions of others bother me, because I’m slowly learning that success is trying more than it is accomplishing.
But the opinion of others still plays a part.
The second fear is that in trying something and not ‘succeeding’ at it means that I may have to realize that I am not as good at something as I thought.
Even though I try to understand that I have value as a human being rather than as someone who has accomplished something, there’s still the risk that my sense of self will be diminished if I have to face the reality that an avenue of achievement that I thought open to me in fact never was, because I wasn’t good enough at something.
And until I try, I never have to find out the answer to that question.
But perhaps the greatest fear to overcome is the fear of how big something I try could become. It has been written before that “it is our light, not our darkness, that we fear” and I think there’s a great truth to that for all of us.
Whenever I’m talking with someone, and they’re telling me their dreams, there’s this moment where you see them dream and then get scared of how big their dream could become. I recognize their emotion, because I see it so much in myself.
The fear of all that we could be is often the greatest thing that holds us back.
So today, I’d like to ask you to accept your fears for a moment, hold onto them, and then set them aside for a day or two and go to work on your dreams.
Because nothing is going to feel worse than a dream that you never went for, or a skill that you never tried.
And the last thing I want for you to feel is regret.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings