Following up on yesterday’s discussion on positive words and reframing, I want to dive deeper into the concept of fear and the use of that word—well, the context of the word.  Fear ranges from mild shock to low-level constant anxiety to outright phobias.  There are legitimate things to fear in this world as well, but I want to talk about the fears related to taking chances.  The fears related to our personal ability.  Lack of belief in our ability creates uncertainty and fear for our survival because we aren’t sure if we are going to make it. Our brains interpret “failure” or “imperfection” as a weakness and it triggers our survival response.  This is why some of the challenges we talked about yesterday can be so detrimental.  We stop ourselves from trying before we even start because of how we view a problem.  I know I hit the pause button on my life for a significant amount of time simply because I didn’t believe in my ability to succeed at any of my goals.  Then I read this quote (source unknown): “Don’t be scared to live, feel good about living with value, purpose and achieving goals.  Fear is doubt in our ability to create.”  Wow.

Fear isn’t just about survival, it’s about interpreting our survival.  Again, there are legitimate threats to safety and survival in this world so we all innately recognize real threats.  But our minds have this weird way of interpreting threats to ego as threats to our survival.  If we think we will fail at something, we have the same physiological response as if our lives were in danger.  This is important because it goes deeper into what survival means to us.  I’ve discussed the purpose of life being expansion previously and we expand when we create—so if we have doubt in our ability to create, we are doubting our ability to survive.  We also limit ourselves when we limit the joy we experience or when we limit how much life we experience.  If we are stuck on the “should” train (I should be doing x, or I should y) then we miss the opportunity to work on our own values, purpose, and goals.  We have to put down should and our inhibitions about what makes us feel good and do what makes us feel good.  That’s how we define our purpose, goals, and value—and how we find what we need to create.    

We spend so much time meeting other’s expectations that we lose sight of our own or we lose the belief that our own expectations are worth meeting before anyone else’s.  Not all of us are meant for the same thing.  Please look at my post about fish and flying.  The short version is we can’t judge fish by their ability to fly.  We need to honor who we are and understand that each of us has a unique purpose.  That is by design.  We were just never taught to embrace that because there were systems that benefitted from our lack of belief in self and played on our survival.  They fed us a carrot a day and said that was all we needed when we were meant to create a whole damn farm.  If we never learned to take care of our own needs, then we’d be reliant on a system to meet them for us.  Don’t get me wrong, there are benefits to having systems in place, but we can’t sacrifice who we are in order to participate.  There are other ways.  Some people swim, some people fly, some people walk—and each of those still gets us to our destination.  Some people’s destinations are different and that’s ok too.  We have to ask ourselves whether it matters if someone tells us we won’t make it where they’re going.  How can it matter if they’re going somewhere on an entirely different map than what you have?  Follow our own course.  Then we will see we weren’t ever creating what they were anyway—we were meant to create something else.  Lean into feeling good and living our lives by our books.  That’s when the magic unfolds and we feel more alive—and suddenly we aren’t just surviving, we are thriving.