"Embrace Fear...your dream life awaits you."
Ideally we don't like to copy and paste someone's exact post, but when my close friend Jennifer emailed me this wonderfully powerful and inspiring link last wk, I thought it was an easy exception to the rule to be shared and read far and wide. It's essentially a Manifesto for Fear.
For the reason alone that it's something we all experience almost on a daily basis, I think our sense of FEAR should be addressed and dissected and dealt with often. I honestly can't say it any better than Justin did when he wrote the post below on WeTheStreets.com, and I want to thank him BIG TIME for sharing his thoughts and inspiring me to face my fears and live with them as opposed to around them.
Justin- Your thoughts and words are forever appreciated, as is your time in creating that post. Many thanks.
We live in a society of some brilliant minds. Look around, you and I are in the presence of some amazing people. The unfortunate truth, however, is that most of us won’t even come close to maximizing what we are capable of doing. We as a society tend to live life completely aware of a feeling of guilt we possess for not exercising the greatness that lies within, but fail to ever do anything about it.
What is it that is holding us back from reaching our true potential?
Is the person that we sit and watch day in day out on the television really that much greater than us? Why is it that we are constantly questioning our abilities? When we were kids, we weren’t afraid to dream. Dreams were a daily occurrence, and there was no one anywhere that could steer us awry. We dreamt with conviction and weren’t scared to think up the most gnarly of situations. Some dreams fell through the cracks never to go anywhere, though, others either were on their way or blossomed in to real life success stories.
Despite our successes and failures during this dream stage of life, we really never got too high nor too low. We just kept on dreaming, and kept on pushing the level higher and higher.
That was until we hit that threshold stage of life, when we reached that invisible line drawn somewhere in the sand where failures became more painful, dreams became less plentiful, and our progress became straight up pitiful. We shifted our sites from dreaming to just keeping up.
What happened at this point in life. What changes were introduced that caused us to just set everything aside for the so called ‘safe bets’ of life?
Most people are crippled by fear, leaning on it to make most their decisions in life, horrible decisions at that.
We are great, and greatness stems from trust in ourselves, in our ability to truly know what’s best for us, not letting society dictate that. We hang out with ourselves the most, why would anyone know us any better?
Once we fall victim to fear, it becomes a dirty game, our trust within ourselves is betrayed and our potential becomes compromised. We shift from a sprint to a limp in milliseconds…it’s a trip.
Fear will drive people to do exactly as they are told to do without ever critically assessing the rules that are established, and will believe that by doing so, they’ll get further in life.
Fear will lead people to leaving the quality of their lives up to luck, believing deep down, that ultimately they’ll be liberated by someone or something magical. As much as I am down with watching the Twilight love story with my wife, it’s fundamentally essential to be the hero in your own story. The ‘persecuted maiden’ role is the coward’s way of living life.
No one is free from Fear, it’s one of life’s guarantees, blessings. Well, I guess it’s a blessing depending on how you deal with it. You can either:
1. Succumb and file in line
2. Embrace it and reap the opportunity it provides
I am not going to touch on the first option, as it’s truly not an option. The latter is where I choose to spend my time. When I started running 3 months ago, I could barely run a mile without bending over and nearly passing out. I have been a longtime sprint athlete, and my endurance, well, it was pretty much non existent. I have kept at it, and just this past month I finished my first ever running event, a 12k, running at just over an 8 minute per mile pace.
That may be impressive to some, maybe it’s not, but that’s not where I am leaving it. While running one day, a buddy of mine asked me what I thought about running in a trail marathon with him late this summer. Well considering I could barely make it on flat ground more than 8 miles, not sure how I would be able to make it 26.2 miles on a trail. On top of that, this trail marathon was part of an uphill Ultra series, starting in the valley and climbing up into the foothills.
Fear rumbled within. The thought of it pushed chills throughout my body, it scared me…but I like that. That day I chose to commit. I committed to preparing, committed to finishing, and most importantly, I committed to dominating my fears.
Fear is epic. Whatever it is that scares you, you’ve simply just got to want it bad enough–bad enough that the pain of NOT moving forward is greater than the pain of taking action. Doing this will give you no other choice but to rally every single cell of your body, mind, heart, and soul to move forward and fight for it–honorably, and with conviction. And then make it yours.
Embrace Fear…your dream life awaits you.
