Fulfilment in Life is the result of taking many little steps one after the other
If you woke in the morning without fear haunting your steps, feeling worthy and entitled to give your all and do your best, what kind of day would you have?
You’d likely have a great day, one to be proud of, a day truly worth living. That’s the power of creating a healthy sense of self-esteem, self-worth and self-belief, helping to shift yourself from just knowing what you want to do, into actually doing it. Without that sense of ‘self ’, it’s easier to wait for tomorrow, but with it, you create the belief that you are entitled to put your best foot forward now, in this moment, no matter what you face.
It allows you to be comfortable in your own skin, accepting ‘you for you’, proud of what you stand for and self-encouraged to get up and do your best every day, not because someone has said that you should, but because you want to. It gives you the power to not only run the race of life, but to do so at your own best level and when that becomes your experience, the face in the mirror looking back at you starts to smile a whole lot more. A person full of self-esteem, self-worth and self-belief lives in the world of “How Can I?” instead of “Why Can’t I?” They don’t wallow in the fear of feeling like they’ve failed, might fail, or will fail, and they don’t see bumps in the road as obstacles to shy away from. Instead they see those bumps as opportunities to learn and grow from. That same person is well set-up to accept their fears, prepare themselves to the best of their ability and give their all. They don’t get caught up in the fear of success or failure; they get caught up in living.
I don’t want to blow your mind here, but feeling like you have failed is a choice, just as every other feeling we lead ourselves to experience is.
Please answer the following question and you’ll understand why ... “If I prepare daily to the best of my ability, trust that preparation and let go to giving my all in the moment and the outcome is not to the level I had aimed for, have I failed?”
I hope you see that the answer to that is “No”. Why? Because in knowing you gave your best and seeking to understand the results, you cannot fail, you can only learn and grow and when you accept that, your perception of ‘what is’ and ‘what is possible’ changes radically and you begin to offer yourself the opportunity to fly.
Then there are no excuses to fall back on and hide behind when things don’t go as well as you had hoped. Instead there are the honest details of what has transpired; there to accept, learn and grow from, no matter how uncomfortable the situation may appear.
That's what I call ‘Higher Learning’; the willingness to give your all and grow from your daily experiences, using that growth to build your ‘self ’, until the belief of what is possible replaces the doubt of what is not.
It’s a magical feeling, that tipping of your scales away from fear towards love and it can be applied to everything; relationships, work, finances, sports and recreation, health and well-being; all the compartments of life ... opening up the wonderful old adage of ...
“If you knew you could not fail, what would you do?”
... totally different from when we hold back and give less than we can, doing just enough to get by, preparing poorly and hiding behind excuses, our scales tipping away from love, back towards fear, dissatisfaction, resentment and feelings of failure as we ...
Live with ‘Fear as Our Guide’ instead of ‘Love as Our Guide’
When that happens we find ourselves hanging on too tight, just waiting for something bad to happen so we can justify those fears. It gives us ‘outs’, ways to make excuses, ways to blame others, ways to live with fear dominating our decisions; making it acceptable to say those dreaded words ... “Ah, it’s not too bad ... I’ll take care of that another day ... I don’t deserve this ... It wasn’t my fault ... That’s not fair ... Why always me? ... I can’t face that ... I just wasn’t feeling it so I didn’t go for it ... Today is not a true reflection of what I can do, I didn’t really apply myself ... It was too hard; you know what, I quit”.
If that becomes the dominant commentary, we tend to learn over and over to doubt ourselves, to question our abilities, beat ourselves up, make excuses about what we ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’, and at best make a half-hearted promise that at some suitable point we’ll find a way to change things.
The problem is that as we become used to this commentary we tend not to find that suitable time. We wait to deal with what we know we should and with fear all too happy to tell us that change might be a scary unknown, we continue to wait.
It’s an uncomfortable place to be and as it becomes an ingrained habit many people find themselves living in a constant state of justification, that on some level it’s okay to give in to fear before ever looking at the actual ‘what is’ of the situation at hand. That can lead them to spend huge amounts of their time and energy worrying about unlikely future events and the possible impact of things that probably won’t even happen. It’s like a ‘Downward Spiral of Doom’ where the continual manipulation of thought, word and action can eventually become an accepted state of being.
The resulting effect is that it is nigh on impossible to feel fulfilled and proud of one’s ‘self ’, because through fear-based habits you choose to live a watered-down version of who ‘You’ really can be.
The shift away from that watered-down ‘You’ comes when someone recognises the habit of too often giving in to fear and applies themselves to changing it, one small step at a time, earning and ingraining a healthy and loving sense of self.
As they fine-tune their reactions and responses, uncomfortable situations that once struck overwhelming fear in them, become challenges to accept and work through, rather than run away from.
The Gift of Two Minutes of Reflection
Open up the awareness of there being better thought choices when you find yourself falling into a downward spiral.
Make yourself the promise that through your thoughts, words, actions and habits you are intent on creating a ripple-effect that helps your sense of self bloom, rather than wither.
The willingness to accept fear, prepare well, apply yourself and cherish your life’s experiences creates an inner smile
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