My Subscriber's question was - How can I ensure that I do not feel scared when taking on a new challenge?
Here are some thoughts and suggestions that I hope you will also find helpful -
Fear is one of the major things that blocks us and gets us stuck. It's natural to feel fear. We are all human. Our life quest is to conquer that fear, take the chances, move forward, and grow from the experience.
1. The first step and part of the answer is to peel away the layers and look at what's behind your fear - Ask yourself - What's behind my fear? What am I scared of? What do I think will happen? What do I worry about? What’s bothering me? Really listen to yourself and dig deep ...
Keep asking yourself - What is my underlying 'belief' about taking on new challenges? Where does that belief come from or originate from? What’s really holding me back? Why? Be really quiet and listen to what comes up from inside of you. Really listen to yourself, in perhaps a way that you’ve not allowed yourself to do before … Indulge yourself … You deserve it …
If you can pin-point it, define it, see it’s shape, look it straight in the eye, then you can know more exactly what you're dealing with and take the appropriate course of action to challenge it head-on.
Keep asking yourself – Is it rational? Is it a true fact? Does it serve my purpose or best interests? Does it get me what I want? What is the pay off for me in feeling/believing this way? Walk through the worse case scenario.
Focusing on fear, allowing it to paralyze you, blocks what is possible and could flow naturally - your true potential. When we resist our life, we resist the opportunity to learn and grow.
2. Our beliefs have been formed from our past experiences in childhood and our adult life so far. Perhaps things haven't worked out at points in time in the past when you took on a new challenge. Review what happened - What did you learn from those experiences? What would you do differently now?
3. Our thoughts create feelings and if you think them often enough they create a cellular remembrance. Think of it as a well-worn pathway - you create well-worn neural pathways in your brain of thoughts and beliefs that you hold as truth for you.
Well-worn thought pathways like perhaps – ‘If I take on the challenge, I fear I'll fail, and then what?...’ Or ‘I fear that I'll succeed and then I don't know if I can handle the consequences, the pressure, the added responsibilities, other people's reactions, what if they don’t like me anymore ...’ Or ‘I fear I'm not good enough and won't make it, it’s too hard or difficult …’ or whatever is appropriate to your particular situation ...
When we keep thinking well-worn patterns of thought, we feel the ‘emotion’ – the 'emotional' reaction we had in the past and your body reacts as if the feared event is actually happening right NOW.
4. Also, the subconscious mind is programmed to maintain the ‘status quo’ - so whenever you start to rock the boat a little, and start thinking about or introducing change, your subconscious will go searching through your inner files for the unfavorable past experiences in an effort to derail you and keep you in your safer comfort zone. You may want the change in your conscious mind, but your subconscious is operating at another level.
5. That's why stilling your mind and truly 'being' in the moment is so important. We tend to spend so much of our time remembering past bad experiences and projecting them into our future, or spend our time on the 'what ifs', the ‘maybes’ and the ‘yes buts’ - and these are all being created by our mind.
6. Quantum Physics and the Law of Attraction tell us that what you spend most of your time thinking about is what you get and attract into your experience. So, it’s important to shift thinking time onto the positive outcome as if it were happening here in the now and experience the 'feeling' and 'emotion' of it.
7. The answer is to stay focused on the moment and just do it, step-by-step, stay in the moment, and move forward. Walk into and through your fear and be proud that you took the steps.
Congratulate yourself for having the courage to take it head-on and challenge it. When you move forward, you'll feel absolutely fabulous for doing so. Often, we find that the imagined fear we had around a certain 'thing' is nowhere near as bad as what we thought.
That’s why its so important to focus on the ‘positive’ scenario until we jump in and just do it and then actually live out and experience the positive scenario.
8. Another great thing to do to give greater clarity is to ask yourself when you’re facing a challenge - What would the consequences (positive and negative) be if I do this? What would the consequences be if I don’t do this?
9. Everything is 'choice'. At every moment we face choice and make a choice, whether good or bad, whether you move forward or not, you are exercising a choice, even if you don’t do anything, or back away, or put it on hold. It's a choice, a flick of a switch.
If you’re in any way pondering the question – How can I overcome my fears when taking on a new challenge? - reveals that you're wanting to improve your life, and you’re not content to just sit back and live your life on default or auto pilot, so that’s great.
You may already be doing some of the above and sometimes it’s interesting to see something reinforced, or experience a new revelation. Be courageous and keep clearly focused on your desired end goal.
© Copyright - Kathy Baker - http://www.allinteractivesolutions.com
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