What you are afraid of is never as bad as you imagined!

We all go through life full of opportunity. It is constantly knocking on our door. It is just around the corner. Opportunity is everywhere imaginable. But our #1 issue with creating or pursuing an opportunity it often involves change. And for most all personality types, that change we are pursuing creates a feeling of discomfort, sometimes painful feelings are resurrected from previous vivid experiences of pursuing opportunity and achieving failure that may have even cost us money or a valued relationship. It is those experiences of our failed past and the future of what we are afraid of that creates this mental razor lined fence that stops many people dead in their tracks and life continues on with the status quo and the once imagined opportunity hits the graveyard of missed opportunity. And at that very moment, someone else somewhere, dug deeper, faced their fears, and seized that very same opportunity.

These opportunities can be as simple as saying “yes” to being on a committee at work or at church. Or stepping up to a civic duty and saying yes to leading a charitable organization, or maybe just taking the time to join one. It could be that you have an idea in your head of starting a new business or changing jobs, or maybe “pulling the trigger” and getting married. The fact is we all have many fears in our head every single day, and we all too often allow these fears to create paralyzing indecision and failure of growth opportunity in our personal life, our work, raising kids, or whatever the case may be. We can not allow those fears to control our decision-making abilities as that not only hurts us, but hurts those around us that matter to us the most. Change and opportunities create often a sickening feeling of discomfort, and we must learn to embrace that feeling, and embrace that fear of failure and redirect that feeling and fear of failure into a positive revolution of intentional actions to create success. It is the natural human instinct to avoid the imagined pain of failure, but we must embrace that pain.

If a person is in a rut or looking for a change, we must change our routine. And changing that routine may require us to do something that sucks every day. Change happens to all of us. We must anticipate change, monitor change, adapt to change, and enjoy change, rather than have this paralyzing imagined fear of change and the outcome of failure. Rather the imagined must be great big huge titanic success! Our old ideas do not lead to new ideas or new successes. But our new ideas lead to new behaviors and when you change what you believe, you will change what you do! Happy Leadership Thursday! Cheers Amigos!