Playing it Safe

“If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.”
—Julia Soul

Rarely, if ever, will we find a person who has never had any fear or hurt or found themselves in an embarrassing situation. We all have fears and anxiety about things that are not in our comfort zones. And we all make mistakes that cause us to feel embarrassed.

We can go through life always playing it safe, never taking a risk, or venturing out to do things we have never tried before. If we do this we will avoid embarrassing situations for the most part. Of course, we won’t get to have as much fun and we won’t grow much as people. We probably will become bored if we aren’t already.

The opportunities we have in life very often contain things which we fear and we may fail when we first attempt them and feel like fools, but in living full lives we must, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “do the thing you think you cannot do.”

We don’t have to start with every challenge or fear, but we need to start with something. We can do one thing that we have fear about. If we’re afraid of water we can take swimming lessons. Maybe we’re afraid of heights so we start with a height we can manage and go up a little more. If we’re afraid to go to school we can start with one class and see how that goes and then take more in the future after we see that we can manage it.

It’s up to us if we want to live or exist. Letting fear stop us, playing it safe is the easy way, but not the most rewarding. We can and will conquer those things that hold us back when we truly give it a shot.

Hiding behind a fear will only keep you hidden.

Taking Action

“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
—Nora Roberts

It all sounds so simple when we think about it, but we tend to make life more difficult by over thinking and worrying about what could be.

We never get anywhere if we are always stuck at a crossroads unable to move left or right or forward. We must make choices and take risks at least daily, but usually many times each day. Every situation offers us the opportunity to sit silently in fear or to move forward. We may face real risks or imaginary ones, but we only fail when we don’t act.

We can choose our battles wisely. We don’t have to go skydiving or take a dangerous whitewater rafting expedition to say we’ve faced fear. Some of us fear a job change, ending or beginning a relationship, or some other simpler decision.

Indecision can become a block in our lives. We may need to ask questions, research our next move, but stating that we don’t have knowledge of what to do is not an excuse that will get us far in life.

Most of what we fear is the unknown. Sometimes this unknown can be scarier than being stuck in a bad situation, but we must face it if we wish to move forward in our lives. In order to get where we want to be we will likely face many challenges and must make a lot of decisions. Occasionally we’ll make the wrong one, but that’s not reason enough to give up.

Taking action is what gets us to the next place.

Fear of Change

“Don’t fear change, embrace it.”
—Anthony J. D’Angelo

Many of us fear change so much that we end up in ruts. Fear of the unknown, of change, is often something that keeps us stuck in our jobs, bad relationships, overweight, uneducated, using drugs, drinking excessively, and on and on.

Change is inevitable so we might as well embrace it when it happens outside our control because that’s going to happen quite frequently. And it really is a blessing when it occurs because it always leads to something better eventually.

None of us ever wants the shock of losing a job either by the company downsizing, fazing out our particular position, or simply getting fired. But often people will say after this happens that it was the best thing because they ended up in a better job or one more suited for them or it simply got them out of their rut. Sometimes the familiar, even if we are miserable, seems better than change. Yet we stay in the miserable place because we have too much fear.

We fear change in other ways as well. What if we lose that extra 50 pounds we are carrying and we still don’t feel loved, then what? Or if we leave a bad relationship we wonder if we’ll just end up alone and lonely. But alone and lonely can be better than bad.

What ifs can keep us stuck in patterns of self-defeating behavior. We rarely know what tomorrow holds and if we do it might have just been a lucky guess. If we know too much what the next day has in store, we may be in a rut because predictable days mean we aren’t growing much. The more we grow, the more changes come our way. And we must embrace the changes if we wish to grow.

Often change is out of our control and it can hit us when we least expect it. But we need to learn how to not immediately feel negativity about change and rather look at it for what it is, an opportunity for growth and maybe a new experience. Maybe that change that hits us broadside that we have no control over is exactly what we needed to motivate us to get out of the rut.

Change is going to happen with our without our participation.

Grow Faith not Fear

“You block your dream when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.”
—Mary Manin Morrissey

Fear is a natural part of us; it’s an essential element, in fact. Fear protects us at times, and it helps us to be cautious, keeps us from moving too fast into situations in our lives.

But fear can also be a block. It may block us from love. It can block our success and even attempts at things. And it can keep us from growth. We must recognize fear and allow ourselves to feel it when we know that it’s a healthy emotion at the time. But what we don’t want to do is hide behind that fear.

We may have tried and failed. Perhaps in relationships we have been hurt and we are just too scared to face that again. Or maybe we’ve had a business collapse or failed at a job where we were employed by others. That’s water under the bridge, not reason to give up because we fear we might lose or fail again.

There are a few things that can be very helpful when we are afraid to move forward: prayer and talking about our fears with someone else. God will hear us and help us through and give us courage. Our friends, mentors, clergy, therapists, or family members can help us just by listening and by talking through the issues. They can help us determine what valid things to fear are and what is just an imaginary boogeyman under the bed.

Our self-esteem and confidence will grow each time we walk through our fears. We will see that fear is not something we should empower in our lives. It is there. It may be there often, but it does not have control over us. We can be stronger than our fears and come out on the other side with renewed faith and success at that which we attempted.

Fear will only grow as large as you allow it, just as faith will do the same.

Keeping at Growth

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dealing with fears or feelings when new situations trigger them can be a difficult thing. We may have thought that we had worked through certain issues and fears and they no longer existed in us, only to find out that some new situation triggers those same old feelings.

Take for instance the fear of abandonment. Maybe in our lives someone walked out, a person who was important to us turned their backs and left our lives. So we fear that happening again. And maybe we worked through it so we just don’t feel it every time we have close personal relationships with others. But then we sense that someone may be about to leave us and those old fears and feelings are as fresh as they were when the tragic event happened.

Feeling them again and experiencing that fear doesn’t mean we haven’t grown; it’s just something that we may have to work on more in our lives. It’s a sensitive issue in our lives, one that may take more work than some other issues.

And there probably are a number of old feelings that may be living under the surface in our lives that can be triggered by the smallest event. What we do with those feelings and how we handle them can be new for us even if the feelings are old and maybe not even be based on reality.

We can stop and really think through the situation, realizing that some of what we feel is based on a circumstance or event that has nothing to do with the present. We may need to talk it over with someone. Prayer and meditation work. Not panicking, but rather stopping and using a recovery behavior we know has worked for us will bring us peace quicker than letting the fear take over.

As much as we learn and mature, we still never reach perfection, so we should not expect that from ourselves. Using things we know to help us through the rough spots is the best solution when old issues come flooding back at us.

Sometimes feelings are out of sight, out of mind, but lurking just below the surface.

Moving Forward Despite Fear

“The purpose of life is not to get rid of the butterflies in your stomach, but to make them fly in formation.”
—Unknown

Stepping out of our comfort zones into new realms of our lives often causes us to become anxious. Do it anyway. Most things that are worth having require effort, fear, and anxiety. Almost anything new we attempt is going to bring us some feelings that we may not necessarily like.

Fear and anxiety ought to not keep us from moving forward or from trying new things. The things in life that we had to work the hardest for most likely mean the most to us now. What we have that came easy is probably taken for granted.

What we can do is realize that anxiety and fear are normal parts of living. We learn to deal with them and take care of ourselves when they strike us. Just because we are scared, we don’t give up on something that we want, at least not until we’ve given it our best shot. Sometimes we aren’t meant to have something, but to give up on it because we have butterflies would be a mistake. If we are honest with ourselves we will know when it’s time to give up or move forward and it won’t be determined by the amount of fear we have.

Fear and anxiety can have a strong grip on us; they can keep us paralyzed and stuck in places that were fine for a time but that no longer suit us as we grow and evolve. We can look back and see many things we did that got us where we are today that probably caused a lot of stress for us, things we had a lot of fear about, but we walked through that and came out on the other side.

Unless we were spoiled and given everything we have, we have gone through a lot of fear and anxiety in life. Just keep those times in mind and see the victories that came with the effort when we trudged along through the muck of fear, stress and hard work.

Let the butterflies flutter they just mean we are alive and living fully.

Controlling Outcomes

“I do believe that when we face challenges in life that are far beyond our own power, it’s an opportunity to build on our faith, inner strength, and courage. I’ve learned that how we face challenges plays a big role in the outcome of them.”
—Sasha Azevedo

Rarely in the journey of life do we absolutely peg the outcome of particular paths and challenges that we face. We may desire things to turn out in one way and have the opposite happen, or things might turn out much better than we could have ever imagined they would.

Often when we are in the midst of something big in our lives we start projecting; thinking thoughts about the future. “What ifs” can drive us crazy if we allow ourselves to get out into tomorrow. We can start obsessing about the craziest things that might happen.

What does happen when we so desperately want to know the outcome is that we miss the journey. And as is often said, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” There’s a whole lot of life going on right this moment that we are absolutely going to miss out on if we are fretting about tomorrow, next week, next year, or our whole lifetime.

Turning the outcome of a thing over to our Higher Power helps us to let go of it and enjoy the moment. We really can’t control outcomes much. We can put our energy into something and give it our all, but we don’t have the final say in what will happen.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the “what ifs” and lose sight of the now. Usually the “what ifs” are not very pleasant because they are fear-based feelings. Turning the outcome over to God gives us more ability to let the “what ifs” go and turns our thinking into positive thoughts instead. And who knows, positive thinking might be better for the outcome than the negativity that comes with fearful “what ifs.”

Live the moment and leave the outcome to God.

Finding Freedom from Fear

“Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is freedom.”
—Marilyn Ferguson

Many of us probably have fears that we don’t tell anyone about. I’m not talking about the fear of public speaking, or heights, or spiders or snakes. The fears that we most likely hide would include things like the fear of abandonment so we choose not to get close to anyone; the fear of failure so we just don’t try very hard; we may have trust issues and just assume everyone lies to us a lot; or maybe we fear commitment so we stay alone. There are many fears that we hide behind in our lives.

There are all kinds of fears that we lock inside ourselves and ways we build walls of protection around us so that we don’t even really have to face those scary invisible demons that hide in our thinking. Even when we know the only way to overcome a fear is to face it head on and go to battle with it if that’s necessary, we will still often choose to continue to live with the fear.

If we truly want freedom in all areas of our lives we must overcome that which holds us back. Consider all of the joy that’s lost if we are walled off from the world because of fear. The fear’s not bringing us joy, but perhaps if we could just work through it to freedom we would find a whole kaleidoscopic world of possibilities we didn’t even know existed on the other side.

Sometimes our fear is simply that of the unknown and since we don’t know what will happen if we don’t have the fear anymore we cling to it as if it’s a life raft instead of an anchor. We can overcome all of our fears even if we have to do it by taking baby steps.

As Mark Twain said, “Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it.”

Find the courage to leave fear behind and you’ll discover freedom.

Fear and Faith

“We must take things one step at a time because we don’t know the whole of a situation. God’s the only one who has the whole picture.”
—Jan Edwards

If we could see into the future and know exactly which twists and turns we would take in life. Or if we knew what calamities would come down upon us. Even if we knew the joys that we would be blessed with. Having all of this knowledge would limit us.

For some of us the unknown is what we fear more than anything. And don’t we turn more to God when we are in fear than we do when we are full of joy? Taking bold steps down our path of life involves fear, faith, courage, missteps, falling down and getting up, and hope. We fear but we have faith that all will work out the way we want and if not, that we get something even better than what we hoped.

Many times we wish we knew why we could not have what we wanted in a relationship, or maybe we wanted a child and were unable to have one for any number of reasons, maybe we missed out on a job or promotion, or we can’t have that nice house across town that we wanted and had to settle for the one we bought instead.

But along that path perhaps something came to us that we didn’t expect. We met a neighbor who turns out to be a wonderful friend that we would never have met if we didn’t live in the house we ended up in. And maybe we ended up going back to school to further our education because we didn’t get the job we desired. Perhaps we now give our energy and love to lots of children since we don’t have our own to care for.

Since we don’t have the whole picture we can never know what the best thing for us is at any given time. We can trust God to know what that is since He does have full knowledge about what’s coming our way. Faith is not an easy thing to have when we want to control our journey, but often it’s the only way we can have any peace since life offers us a rocky path.

One step at a time, one day at a time, we can follow the path that God leads us on in life.

You Can Only Achieve What You Believe

“To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.”
—Muhammad Ali

Even if we are not trying to be the champion of something, we still have to believe to achieve. Our self-esteem is dependent on what we think about ourselves. It matters not if 100 people tell us how great we are or how well we’ve done something, if we don’t believe it for ourselves it makes no difference to us.

Some of us suffer from social anxieties which means that most of the time in order to do things in public we must talk ourselves into going, and often once we get there we are fine and able to engage. But how many times did we not do things because we were too afraid?

That time is in the past and now we can go in confidence because we know why we are “shy” and we know that we can do it. For those who suffer from this anxiety hold your head high next time you are in a situation that you fear. Most of the time other people are more worried about themselves than you, they have their own anxieties about things. Think of yourself as good enough, honorable enough, outgoing enough and go to that event or put yourself in that situation that you really want to be in, but are afraid.

No matter if we are trying to get up the nerve to attend a party or some other social event, or to get on stage to perform, we must believe we are good enough and strong enough or we won’t be able to make it. Like the old saying, “Fake it ‘til you make it,” it’s up to us to attempt things we fear.

Living a full life means that we often must face our fears and move out of our comfort zones in order to experience all that life has to offer.

If you don’t believe you can do it, you can’t.