What is fear costing you?  What would live look like without fear? I LOVE these questions.  They are simultaneously fascinating and thought provoking, infuriating and terrifying, liberating and sobering.  We’ve been talking a lot about potential this week, and fear has a lot to do with keeping us from realizing and acting on our potential.  Fear has a lot to do with not honoring that spark and moving forward.  Part of it is biological and natural and the other part is learned.  Fear is, at its core, designed to protect us so when we bring out new ideas that we haven’t seen before and are told that we need to go out on our own for a bit to create them, it can be intimidating as hell.  Our brain tells us the unknown is dangerous, so even if we have that curiosity and desire to work on something new, there may still be alarm bells going off.  But if we learn to override those bells and follow what’s in our hearts, we CAN lay a solid foundation and bring out the most amazing ideas.

This isn’t to be morbid or depressing but we all know what fear costs us on some level.  Ask ourselves what we regret and we all have a handful of moments we either wish we had done something differently, said something differently, or acted on our gut.  There is unrealized potential in every one of those moments because we never know what may have happened.  This may be overly simplistic but the life can change with a simple yes or no.  If we think too long on the ramifications of those little words, we may overwhelm ourselves into indecision, but those choices all have an impact.  Applied to a grander scale, when we choose to ignore our calling, we delay what is meant to happen and we deny the world of a gift that has the potential to shift everything. 

Life without fear (and to be clear we ARE talking about illogical fear where there isn’t any physical harm involved) looks and feels incredibly different than what we live now.  The hours we operate change, the creativity flows differently, laughter comes more easily, we carry our bodies differently, we treat ourselves and others differently.  Fear closes us off where as stepping on the other side is an expansive act.  We see new ideas and opportunities rather than danger.  We see potential instead of repetition.  Live without fear answers questions, creates more questions, and then answers them again with even bigger questions—it goes on.  Fear shrinks us so it costs us the space we need to become who we are.  Don’t let that happen.  We can keep our ideas private at first but eventually we need to get comfortable with our purpose, and when we share that, there is no stopping it.  Live without fear and we will never have regrets about what could have been—and we will always have the story of what we became.