Where fear is allowed to reign, dreams are left to die. Everyone feels afraid at one time or another, but to have everything we want in life we have to push through our fears and do what needs to be done. I know it’s sometimes scary to even think of doing things that scare us – but what is even more frightening is to think about coming to the end of our time on this planet having never watched our heart’s greatest desires realized. We must free ourselves from the constraints of fear, and allow our dreams to fully manifest.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing, which you think you cannot do.” This quote states the problem and the solution. We must stop running away from things that frighten us, face our fears head on, then do the thing we fear the most.
Most of the time we’ll find out that the “thing” was not that scary after all. Our imaginations had behaved like a super fertilizer and grown a grotesque monstrosity in our minds. Remember, our imaginations are incredibly powerful. They can work against us, creating horrible images that leave us paralyzed with fear. But they can also work for us, building a world where everything we do is an adventure, a miracle. And the most amazing thing is that we hold the power to control our minds – we allow fear to dominate our lives or we choose to dominate fear. Those are our only two choices.
Most people are paralyzed by fear. Overcome it and you take charge of your life and your world.
What is it that you fear the most? Before you can eliminate fear from your life you’ll need to identify exactly what it is that you fear. It may only be able to come up with a few. Or you may need to buy a few notebooks to make your list. Whatever they are, and however many you have, it is up to you to name them and begin to delete them – one fear at a time. How do you conquer fear? There’s only one way – “do the thing you cannot do”.
Scary, but very necessary.
To begin to liberate yourself from fear take out your journal or notebook (or notebooks) and ask yourself these questions over and over again for each fear, until you get to its core.
• What am I afraid of?
• Is this a fear I want to overcome and delete from my life?
• Am I allowing this fear to keep me from achieving my dreams?
• If I did the thing that I fear what would happen to me physically?
• What would happen to me mentally?
• Would the opinions of others matter to me if I did this? If so, why?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen if I did this? Could I live with this outcome?
• What’s the best thing that could happen if I did this? Would this outcome make me happier than I am right now?
Imagine it’s your last day on earth. As you review your life is this fear going to haunt you? Will you say: “I wish I had overcome this fear. I wasted years of my life allowing this fear to control me.”?
Your answers to these questions – especially number 8 – will determine whether you should proceed to take action to eliminate each fear from your life. When the positive results outweigh the negative possibilities you’ll know you need to destroy the fear – or it will destroy your dreams.
