When was the last time you were afraid?
Today?
Yesterday?
Last week?
Last month?
Or maybe you’d rather not even answer.
Regardless of when or even where you were last afraid, the idea of fear is so deeply ingrained in our brains that we will never in our entire lifetime be free from it.
And that, in my opinion, is the best thing ever.
I never want to be without fear.
Every day I want to have felt some kind of fear, some touch of the butterflies in my stomach, my pulse racing in my veins and feeling my skin flush from the adrenaline in my body.
What?
Hear me out before you freak out.
Fear is a totally human response. It is our immediate emotion when we are in danger or when we are about to attempt something that either we have never done before or something that we are not 100% comfortable doing.
It is what stretches us beyond our boundaries and allows us to grow as humans and as people.
If you give yourself a goal of losing weight and getting healthier, then fear will naturally become a part of that goal.
Why?
First because you worry that you might not succeed- the fear of failure. Second because what happens if you do succeed- the fear of success.
This dichotomy is one of the things that make us unique as a species.
As much as we have our natural instincts, our thinking mind takes us up a notch on the fear scale. We are capable of feeling fear of two opposing things at the exact same time.
Why would someone be afraid of both failing and succeeding all at once?
This happens, believe it or not, because it’s actually easier than just being afraid of one.
Fear of anything means a fear of stretching your limits. Whether you fail or succeed, you are stretching yourself past your normal- past your already established boundaries.
And this is perhaps even harder than actually doing the thing your were afraid of in the first place.
Whether you fail or succeed, you are leaving your “safe space”, the place where everything is a known quantity. Once you leave this safe space, you can never go back there because you have challenged yourself to see another option. Everything changes once you embrace your fear and chance failure or success.
Do you feel like you’re running around in circles yet?
Another question might be why do we even fight fear?
What do we have to gain from fighting fear?
Why do we try to ignore it and pretend like it doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t affect us?
My simple answer: It’s because its way easier to pretend something doesn’t exist rather than dealing with it.
Let’s take this answer and apply it to our potential weight loss and healthier living goal.
Why is it easier to pretend that our goals don’t exist rather than actually dealing with them and doing the work?
Why are we afraid of both failing and succeeding?
Why does fear enter the equation when we set goals for ourselves?
The answers to these questions may have many variables that take on different shapes for you versus the shapes they take on for me.
But the end result of these questions around fear bring us back to the same place that we were in before- change of the status quo, the permanent disappearance of our “safe space”, the ultimate forever loss of our known.
If you strive to lose weight and become healthier, you are choosing to leave forever the safe and known space of your current life.
You will need to address and then change your habits, some of which may be ingrained from your childhood.
You are forced to see yourself for who you really are and the body in which you currently inhabit.
Once you see the truth, you can never go back and whether or not you actually achieve your health goals, you are now a changed person.
This is perhaps the scariest part of setting and then going after your goals.
“What if I succeed” or “What if I fail” become easy questions to deal with when faced with the prospect of going somewhere you have never been before with zero opportunity to return to where you’ve been.
This is at the heart of why we can pretend our goals don’t exist. This is why its easier to not actually do the work that will get us where we say we want to go.
If we don’t really set out to achieve our goals, then nothing will change.
And if nothing changes, then we don’t have to change.
And if we don’t have to change, then we won’t ever be uncomfortable.
And if we don’t have to be uncomfortable, then we can stay exactly where we are.
The problem with staying exactly where we are is exactly that. We don’t go anywhere. We don’t accomplish anything.
And this is the exact reason why I want to wake up everyday faced with something that scares me, at least a little bit.
It is this fear that drives me to step outside of my boundaries and into something more amazing than ever before.
This is where I am the most free, the most able to be my amazing self and where, I believe, you’re free to do the same.
