Embrace the fear

The greatest men to walk these planes did not run from their fears, they embraced it. Rather than to run, they used that time to prepare and face the fears. Those who will confront it will achieve more than simply overcoming the fear. Are you tired of running?

Fears. Everyone has them. From simple fears to life altering ones. Many people spend years of their life avoiding the things they fear the most. Not only does it cost you time that you could’ve spent on other things, it also drains energy. Energy that cannot be regained nor time that cannot be rewound. It will be easy to state all kinds of motivating words in high abstract which sound lovely when you read it but that will not help you forward. In this story I will try to use my experiences to guide you to embrace the fears, prepare for them and overcome it. Once realising the powerful feeling I bet you will do it more often.

At the core it comes down to confronting the fear rather than to avoid it. But how does such a confrontation look like? Let me give you an example: I’ve always been a person with low confidence and therefore never had the courage to get into an argument. With that I pushed myself back from developing myself, growing into the person I am today, and missing out on all kinds of life experiences. This was also the case on the workplace. I would never argue with my boss but complain in silence, chucking up all the negative emotions. All to avoid confrontation, to run. Sad part is, the more a ran from it the more I ran into a whole lot of other problems. This continued until I couldn’t look myself into my eyes when I stood in front of the mirror. I was fed up. I asked myself what is my goal in life? What are my traits and what are my flaws? Furthermore, what is rational to ask from my boss? How can my job contribute in achieving my goals? With all the questions answered, I made my move. It was time for the confrontation. We sat down, I started talking my goals in life, how I saw my job contributing to the goals and what I needed from my boss. Guess what? No yelling, no shouting. Even though I was prepared for it there was none of that. We had a constructive conversation. Found solutions. A weight lifted from my shoulders and I felt powerful.

I had to learn through struggles. Struggles I can take away from you via this story. Don’t run from your fears. Instead, make a list. A list of the goals you have in life. Break them down to concrete and manageable chunks. Order them, then look at your traits and flaws and decide a plan. After that, all you have to do is to go to the mirror, take a deep breath, say “This is what I will achieve” and go out and do it with your plan in hand. Don’t worry about failure. Failure is part of life. Simply look at your plan, make some rearrangements or adjustments and move on. Success is not given, it is earned.

How does it actually look like?

So, all nice words and all but how does this look like in the real world? Well, for me it works best to organise my goals and the best way to do such a thing is to write it down. On the internet there are loads of free tools, and paid ones, that will allow you to write down to-do lists or to even use more organised planning that will allow you to track the tasks even more accurate. To my opinion having a simple checklist is more than sufficient. But feel free to use extensive tools. Just don’t forget that it is supposed to guide and not drown you. I, for example, use todoist. Let’s show you one of my goals that I’ve written down into achievable chunks.

I took the example of “write a book”. After I created it as a task, the tool allows me to brainstorm all the things I need to do as subtasks to my goal of “write a book”. Now I can keep track of things and I’ve made every subtask an achievable task without having to think about the greater picture. You can expand this to every goal you define. Getting ripped for example. Do note that I write the subtasks down to chunks that are achievable to me. Sometimes you need smaller chunks, sometimes that just isn’t necessary. It is a mere tool out of many tools to guide you.

Does this guarantee success?

This does not guarantee success. Not everyone will benefit this the same way. But for those that have to overcome their fears it is just a very simple but effective way to define the goals in life and the hurdles that need to be tackled to get there. These kinds of lists made me more confident in my abilities and the challenges that lie ahead. I know I will fail but I have a plan that will get me back up and running and that is how I keep going forward.