“We lie to ourselves to avoid the risk of becoming,” Loren Ridinger. I didn’t want to admit the truth in this statement.  Like our parable yesterday, I didn’t want to take responsibility for anything more than I felt I could handle and I thought I was being practical.  We tell ourselves someday or that we will do it when the time is right knowing full well we are setting some arbitrary standard to mark when we start living our lives. Make no mistake, there are real issues we face that sometime would legitimately impede us from moving forward in a productive manner.  But when we take the every day mundane details and use them as the reason why we can’t get out of performing the every day mundane details, we’ve created our own mental trap.  The things we want to break out of suddenly become the things we are reliant on to keep us in our little bubble.  So we tell ourselves a story where we get to be the victim—we’ve done the work but look, nothing has happened so that’s not my fault!

It is a risk to decide to be something else.  It’s a risk to shed what we know in favor of something we don’t know all on the chance of what could be.  But we can’t let our own thoughts and fears be the very thing that hurts us or holds us back.  We tell ourselves we can’t for whatever reason before we even try—if we don’t try we will never get anywhere anyway.  If the caterpillar never built the cocoon it wouldn’t grow wings.  If the bird never broke out of the shell it would die.  So why do we cut off the exact opportunity we need?  Because we aren’t sure we can carry ourselves through becoming who we are meant to be.  We know who we are, we are comfortable where we are so even if we say we want to make the move to something different, when it comes down to it, it makes it nearly impossible to shift.  We know what we have and we feel safe.

Ending with this concept of safety. We can create the safest nests for ourselves that we love and tend to with care and purpose and several things can still happen:  we can still feel like we need something more, still feel the call that the space is too constricting. After time we may feel the need to change the surroundings entirely but we fear hurting someone’s idea of who we are—or our own because we aren’t living how we thought we would.  The other thing is some outside forces can destroy what we built and we may have 0 control over it.  All the planning, protection, and care in the world will not stop certain things from happening—not even the worst things.  So the point is this: we are afraid of becoming because of what we have built.  We need to start asking ourselves if what we built is still what we want, and more importantly, is it what we need in that moment?  Don’t ignore what we know already which is that we are all fully capable of becoming exactly what we need to be and going higher than we ever thought possible. We just have to take the risk.