Bang! You’re Out! Dripping with sweat I wipe my brow and stand there looking over it. My chest rises and falls quickly and with my fists clenched I feel victorious yet ready to punch again if it even flinches.
There it lay on the ground. After holding hostage seasons of my life, I had finally roused up the courage to fight back. The reporters gathered in around me as the referee wrapped a purple robe around my shoulders and a golden belt across my waist. They bombarded by a series of questions:
“How did you do it?”
“What’s your secret?”
“Did you have doubts about being able to take him out?”
“What were you thinking about during the match?”
But all I could do was stare over at fear. Although I was utterly exhausted both physically and mentally I felt a large weight lift off my shoulders. Fear was dead. Its final fallout had arrived.
How do we deal with fear? The type of fear that arises when you’re about to embark on new territory in the land of your dreams? What is the truth about fear?
1.) Fear sometimes sounds like the voice of logic. We sometimes confuse the voice of fear for the voice of logic. Logic says, if you put ice cubes in the freezer, they will freeze. Fear says, if you put ice cubes in the freezer, they freeze and then maybe your whole home will freeze too by default. Fear has a tendency to blow things way out of proportion and especially in our mind. If we let it, fear will bind us before we can even utter a word. Fear has a clever way of mixing just enough logic with a big fat lie and if we’re not careful, then our minds will begin to rationalize and eventually give in to voice of fear.
Are you willing to try and fail and then try again and again until you succeed? How long are you willing to wait and what are you willing to invest in order to achieve your dreams and goals? What are they worth to you?
2.) Fear sometimes will seem to make sense.Golden nugget of the day: not every good thing or good opportunity is going to make sense. It simply won’t. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we’ll stop trying to make perfect sense out of the many mysteries of life. Are you willing to try and fail and then try again and again until you succeed? How long are you willing to wait and what are you willing to invest in order to achieve your dreams and goals? What are they worth to you? We can’t explain why it took Thomas Edison over 10,000 attempts before he finally succeeded. He was even quoted as saying, “ I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” What will you be quoted as saying?
What will you be quoted as saying?
3.) Fear will work with reason and procrastination to try and convince you not to do something you know you’re called to do. Have you ever found yourself in a situation in which you ended up talking yourself out of doing something that you actually wanted to do and committed to do in the first place? Fear manipulates reason to facilitate excuses in our minds that make us feel not so bad for not doing the things that we know we should (and even wanted) do in the first place.
4.) Fear will try and justify itself when you confront it. Fear is the king of excuses. So once you confront it when it shows up in your life, then the excuses will pile up faster than you can imagine. Fear can even lead you to believe that it is the excuse in and of itself to keep you from achieving your goals and dreams. So before fear even knocks at your door you must already have a strategy of how you will respond. Once you get face to face with fear, the only way to fight it and win the fight is with the truth. And the only way to fight with truth, is to actually know the truth. Do you know the truth?
Do you know the truth?
5.) Fear will try and steal your voice, diminish your potential and rob you of the life you could live. It’s so subtly deceptive but if we listen to the voice of fear long enough we will become fluent in the language of fear. We’ll start talking like fear talks until we have no real voice left of our own. Once fear has taken your voice then it will try and keep you from ever going to the heights that you were destined for. Whether it was actually running that marathon, starting a new career or making new friends, fear is a thief waiting for those that will fall prey to its snare.
So, when you hear the voice of fear, you don’t have to entertain it nor allow it to rob you of a single moment of your life. Decide ahead of time, before you’re even confronted with fear, how you will live your life. Will you look back on the things you wish you would have done? Or will you live by your convictions and not by fear.
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