What’s the biggest impediment to living and acting with purpose and intention? Fear. If you continue to put off making a decision, there’s something you fear. When you avoid taking action, it’s because there’s fear in there somewhere. Most likely you have constructed an elaborate set of perfectly reasonable excuses for staying put. Nonetheless, the real, underlying reason is a fear of some kind.
A fear of some kind… Much of the power of that fear is that it exerts its influence anonymously, taking on disguise in the form of those excuses. The thing to do is to shine the light of your awareness on it. Give it a name. Encounter it.
Every fear has some justification. Even so, most fears are largely unreasonable. As long as you avoid the fear, you can’t see that. The moment you begin to look at it, though, is the moment you begin to get beyond it.
Ask yourself this. What’s the worst that can happen? Imagine for a moment that it does indeed happen. Would you be embarrassed? Most likely, yes. Would you be inconvenienced or in pain or plunged into debt? Perhaps. Would you survive? Probably. Would you learn from the experience? Absolutely. Would you eventually be better off than you are now, even if the worst were to happen? There’s a very good likelihood that you would.
These are questions only you can answer for yourself, and that’s precisely the point. Ask them and answer them. Instead of avoiding the fear, and allowing it to keep you locked in place, encounter that fear. The way beyond it, is through it.
The genesis of courage is not in doing the thing you fear. It is in accepting and examining the fear itself. Look at it this way. The first step is not to do what you fear, so there’s really no risk. The first step is simply to look at what you fear. Really look at it, intently and objectively. Chances are, it will wither under your gaze. And just like that, you’ll be moving forward.
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