| Fear. What is it? Can you touch it?
Can you hold it? Can you show it to another
person? I can almost hear you from where
I am
sitting. "No, no, no." Okay then,
so you can't touch it, you
can't hold it, and you can't show it to
another person. The
question then is, why? Why do we have fear?
Fear is nothing more
than an emotion or a feeling that we hold
in our mind. We fear
either the emotional or physical pain something
may cause. The
problem is, these emotions and feeling affect
the way we live our
lives. We fear doing certain things because
we think we might fail.
This may be due to past failures we have
actually experienced or it
may be due to failures we fear we might
experience.
I urge you to remember and live by the following
motto.
Fear stands for:
False
Evidence that
Appears
Real
Most of the time what we fear, we have
never even experienced!
Isn't that crazy? You see, your mind has
a hard time determining
whether you've actually experienced the
failure or just imagined
it. Either way, you feel the physiological
symptoms of the fear;
such as an upset stomach. Often, because
we can imagine some sort
of failure, we believe it will come true,
and then we don't even
try! And that is what makes a failure; a
person who is afraid to
try because they fear the potential of a
negative outcome. If you
don't at least try, you can never succeed.
"I have been through some terrible
things in my life, some of which
actually happened."
- Mark Twain
The question now becomes who defines what
'failure' and 'success'
is? You do right? Either you create the
definition yourself or
you accept someone else's definition. Is
it true then that some
people create more difficult definitions
of success and failure
for themselves than others do? You bet it
is! Who do you think
leads a more successful live, Alex who defines
success as, "everyday
that I wake up and I'm not six feet under,
is a great day." Or
Jeff, who defines success as, "I have
to be earning at least
million dollars a year before I am successful."
You guessed right again. Alex. You see,
Alex has created her own
definition of what success means and that
definition is relatively
easy to achieve! Therefore, in her mind,
she is successful
everyday. Whereas Jeff, as per his own definition,
cannot be
successful until he is earning one million
dollars a year. What
are the chances that most of the 'Jeff's'
in the world feel like
failures on a daily basis because they are
not yet earning one
million dollars a year? Now don't get me
wrong. I'm not saying
that you should not set high standards and
goals for yourself.
What I am saying is that you have to be
careful that you 'happily
achieve, rather than achieve to be happy'.
The more difficult your definition of success
is to attain, the
more fear you will attach to it. Don't let
your own definitions
limit you. Or even worse, the definitions
of others. Create your
own definitions to make it harder to feel
like a failure and easier
to feel like a success. That way you will
attach less fear to what
you want in life. What would you attempt
to do if you knew you
could not fail? Image what you can do in
your life with that type
of belief system. Try thinking of every
'failure' as a success.
That is, every time you 'fail' at something,
you have really
succeeded because you have learned what
does not work. Therefore,
you are closer to succeeding the next time
you try. Remember that
the past does not equal the future. Yesterday's
failure does not
equal your future outcomes. Just because
you may have failed
yesterday, or even five minutes ago, it
doesn't mean you are going
to fail again. Just learn from what you
did wrong and change your
approach. Don't fear the past. The past
is what has taught you
how to succeed in the future. Be fearless!
- Glen Hopkins
This article may be reprinted with the
following attachment:
Copyright (c) 1999 Glen Hopkins
------------------------------------------------------------
Glen Hopkins, owns Motivational-Messages.com,
your Free resource
for daily motivation and inspiration, including
quotes, tips, and
stories to help you lead a successful life.
To join the Free mailing
list, send an e-mail to mailto:motivationalmessages-subscribe@listbot.com
or visit http://www.motivational-messages.com/
------------------------------------------------------------
|
