“Looking silly feels uncomfortable for a minute but letting doubts and fears own us is uncomfortable for a lifetime,” Robin Sharma.  As I ended yesterday’s piece about speaking up, I came across this quote that I had been saving for a few weeks.  In the matter of speaking up, whether for ourselves or others, the other side is the issue of appearance—we are afraid of what we look like and how we will be perceived to others.  Not just the reaction to our words, but the reaction to us as a person and that we look silly, unprepared, or any other way.  That tends to be a major block to showing up authentically which stops us from ever showing up completely.  The human brain wants to keep us alive and our survival instincts are very much tied to the acceptance and perception of others.  We never want to be on the outside because that is a form of death today.  If we aren’t with the group we have the potential to be alone.  It takes a lot to override that instinct and to fight the drive to equate acceptance with survival.

But speaking as someone who held in a lot of her personal preferences for too long, as someone who has witnessed people give up their entire lives for the sake of the good of others (or what they thought was the good), as someone who lived on insecurity so bad that I took it out on my physical being (overeating, self-harm, unmanaged energy/drive, etc.), I can say that the moments we sit in silence when given the opportunity to shine we can never get back.  Each time we choose comfort over truth, we lose something of who we are, our energy misplaced.  And we feel it.  I mean, there are times to weigh the options, I’m not suggesting we freely and carelessly spout words or behave a certain way.  I am suggesting that we need to remove other’s opinions from the equation and if we really want something then we need to go for it before it is too late.

We don’t want to get in the habit of silencing the desires we feel because those are the things that bring us to our passion.  Those are the guideposts for the steps we need to take to create the life we are meant to have that teaches us to share those gifts—and in turn teaches others how to do the same.  There will come a time where, for certain things, it will be too late.  We won’t be able to be part of the picture because the moment is gone.  We won’t be able to pursue what called to us because we aren’t physically able to.  We lose the capacity and capability to say what we really need to say because we don’t stretch that muscle.  They say the comfort zone is where dreams go to die—and while I find that a tad dramatic, I understand it.  If we constantly seek comfort we don’t grow.  We need to remember that this is a momentary feeling.  When we choose the temporary discomfort, we create space, and in the long run, that comfort zone expands.  When that happens we have less to fear because our frame of reference is bigger.  And we learn that our ego, the fear of how we appear is all in our heads because we can always say we are doing more than the people on the sidelines judging us.  So take any opportunity to look silly that we can.