Some people navigate their way through life motivated by fear, fear of failure, fearful of the future, fear of consequences. However, we are not born fearful; we learn to do life with fear. We are led to believe that if we are not fearful we will not take action, we won’t be alert to risks, and we won’t get about our lives and achieve.
None of this is true. We are born wanting to achieve. We didn’t learn to walk by being afraid of failure. We knew what we wanted to do and we got about doing it. Fear holds us back. It’s usually the reason for procrastination. It blocks progress, connection and communication. It takes up our mental bandwidth and uses up our energy.
Fear isn’t telling us anything about our situation. It is telling us about our thinking about our situation.
We innocently believe that fear puts us ahead of the game and makes us more aware of the risks and pitfalls of life. But this isn’t true. If we are thinking fearfully then we cannot be thinking clearly. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever feel fear, it’s a natural human emotion, but when we know where it’s coming from and what it really is, we are able to navigate our way through challenges and situations without fear being our sat nav.
Calm assessment with a clear mind, using our inbuilt, always available Wisdom is far more helpful to us. It keeps us safe, it keeps us on track and it always points us in the right direction. Wisdom is always there, under the noisy catastrophizing of the fearful thinking.
To believe our motivation comes from fear of consequences or fear of failure is being disingenuous to ourselves. We are natural explorers, goal setters and achievers. When we get about living our lives because of love, desire and excitement (our natural states) rather than a fear of what will happen if we don’t, then we are able to operate with energy, clarity and focus, enhancing our chances of success and enabling us to stay committed and keep moving forward.