Allow Yourself to Feel the Fear and Do What You Want Anyway

What holds you back and stops you from doing what you’ve always dreamt of? What’s stopping you from creating the life of your dreams or becoming everything you wanted to become? Are you afraid of failure or success? For a lot of people it’s both, which doesn’t leave many options open. It was Helen Keller who said ‘Life is a daring adventure, or nothing at all’. Fear of the unknown is a normal part of life but one that we should learn to leverage to our advantage rather than allowing it to stand in our way.

Fear and excitement both generate the same physiological response: your heart starts to race and your adrenalin glands start pumping to give you the edge you need to stay and enjoy the experience, or get out of there and save yourself! The only difference between the fear and excitement response is your perception of the situation - one is negative and the other is positive. In many situations whether you experience fear or excitement is entirely your choice, which explains why some people can ride a rollercoaster and love it, while others find it terrifying. Do you see the challenges you face every day as things you ‘have’ to do or things you ‘get’ to do? One point of view drives fear and the other drives excitement. Fear is easier in the short term, because it gives us an excuse to give up or to back away from a situation.

Four years ago my partner and I chose to sell our business and relocate to the Gold Coast so that we could live our dream. The emotions that arose in us when we were considering leaving the security of our own business to start again from scratch brought up all kinds of fear and negativity that almost stopped us from doing it. But we took a breath and looked rationally at how fear was guiding our decision. Sure, we could have comfortably kept going the way we were and felt secure, but we would always have wondered what we might have achieved if we took the step outside of our comfort zone and lived our own daring adventure. These days our life and business are totally limitless and we can take them absolutely wherever we choose to. Now my life feeds me energy instead of sucking it out of me.

I choose to live my life by the rule that ‘If it’s hard to do, that’s all the more reason to do it’ and as a result, people often mistakenly think that I don’t experience fear, which is most definitely not the case. Even the most fearless person you know is intimately acquainted with fear. The difference is that some people choose to take a deep breath, close their eyes and push through to the excitement on the other side … and some do not. Choose to push through your fear and make your life your own daring adventure!