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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
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Glen Hopkins, owns Motivational-Messages.com, your Free resource
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