“Courage is not the absence of fear, rather it is the ability to take action in the face of it.”

I wonder if you are able to identify with me on this one?

The odds are that you can think of something you are putting off – an unpaid bill, changing the address on your driving licence, a difficult conversation or writing to thank Great Aunt Stroma for her Christmas present.

I doubt that the feelings you are currently experiencing are all that brilliant? I personally feel uncomfortable when I remind myself how long it’s been since I last wrote on here, or that I haven’t been eating healthily and exercising well.

The solution to resolving this perpetual angst it to either do what we are avoiding, or make peace with the consequences of not doing it. However what we all to often do is mentally put it off. I find myself reasoning with the situation, the classic “I’ll do it tomorrow” and other seemingly valid reasons may arise from my mind.

Not only do I placate the mental reminder, with whatever reasoning I have at my disposal, I distract the mind with avoidance tactics, often going to extreme lengths. The all too familiar running away to “find oneself” springs to mind, in my case, it would be a fuck you to society and the system which I refuse to accept. No matter what lengths I go to in suppressing what gnaws at my subconscious; drugs, relationships, drinking to excess or just spending time on my bike or with my friends. The situation does not go away and my quality of life has deteriorated.

Right now I have to come clean; I have allowed procrastination to set in and it has spread through many a more serious aspect of my life.

I feel the tension in my stomach, that knot and unconformability now as I write and I want to avoid these surfacing feelings and undertake many a flanking maneuver, when a direct assault is called for.

There is no machine gun nest yet I feel feelings of real fear and the bodily sensations that go with it.

We do not have to be on the battlefield to perform great acts of courage. Our daily life will deliver ample opportunity to do so. Although we do not face literal threats to our survival, we face the ghosts of real perceived threats in our past in the present moment. Trauma is where people re-live the traumatic events from the past in the present; we all have trauma, some more severe, though it is all relative and real to each of us. Be it the brown envelope, the tricky conversation, the picking up and dusting off or the risking of ourselves in a new relationship, we are called to act courageously in the face of real fear, fear that our minds perceive as a direct threat to our survival and wellbeing.

In our minds, we are often unable disseminate between real or imagined threats  and the bodily sensations, feelings and emotions which accompany them.

Having left my job where I was unhappy, I decided to follow my hearts calling and work out what the fuck it is. The initial dopamine rush of taking massive action has cooled down and I seem to be left with “well now what?”.

It feels like the doldrums, airless and uncomfortable and it feels like I am drifting aimlessly. I am indeed way out of my comfort zone, having only just managed to pay my rent this month and currently using Boots points to pay for my food.

It is apparrent to me that what I need is structure, with a well thought out plan and goals to drive me forward. I haven’t the foggiest about running a business, let alone starting one, but I can read, ask people who have and learn by taking action. Action.

Yet why have I not done this?

Fear, of failure.

I have lain in bed until 11 o’clock this morning and wasted my time on menial tasks watching YouTube videos of people who have narrowly escaped death and I have spent much of the last fortnight playing the Playstation in a fully fledged attempt at sheltering me from the responsibility of my life and my dreams.

There are literally lives at stake (my dreams will help people) and I procrastinate because of my own selfish fear of failure – extraordinary!

However this is anything but extraordinary. We all do it and people are dying because of it.

Whether we want a healthy relationship, to be able to publicly speak or leave our job and go on that adventure we promised ourselves, we are often plagued by fear of failure and ultimately self sabotage such that many of us will never knock on the door to these opportunities for fear that we will be turned away.

Anything which causes fear to arise in us comes from something which happened in our past. Maybe we stood up in front of the class and people laughed at what we had to say and from then on we have never spoken in public. The thought of it confronts us with immense fear and hence we have not conveyed our business ideas and were passed over for promotion, having sat in silence in the boardroom.

Tasks are indifferent, as are all things; it is only our past experience that adds significance to one over another. I have never been afraid of public speaking, but tax returns or anything which requires excel and planning, must be avoided at all costs. The notion of planning and creating a financial model for my business is paralysing!

I feel transfixed by the task of getting my shit together and coming up with a financially sound plan. And I have played Playstation and done almost anything to avoid taking responsibility for seeing my dream realised. The inordinate amount of effort and the emotional toll which this desperate aversion of responsibility takes, far outweighs that of just doing it.

It is really simple; I can either give up on my dreams and let go of being anything more than the sum of the bare minimum, herded by primal fear towards mediocrity and discontent. Or, I can commit to them, take that primal fear head on and really start living in reality; there is no machine gun, no sabre-tooth tiger and no classroom full of children.

Master Yoda putts it perfectly;  “Do or do not – there is no try.”

I am not saying that our fears of rejection are not real, they are very much real to us and the accompanying feelings are very much there, often painfully so. Yet the situation from which those feelings arise (that time where you perceived rejection or stood up in front of the class) is in the past and therefore does not exist. The great shame of our wonderful minds, which have ensured our existence and the possibility of our dreams, is that we can end up living at the mercy of insanity. The insanity is that we live in a cage of present fears, because something that happened in the past may happen again in the future, when neither the past from which the fear originates, nor the future we cannot see exist.

So to wrap it all up:

Yes the feelings are real and No they won’t likely disappear in an instant or perhaps at all, but we can see the fear for what it is and enter reality.

Reality isn’t personal and the classroom doesn’t exist. Sure we can act out our fears and self sabotage, bringing about the circumstances which align with our fearful mental projections, though we can also act in spite of fear.

By acknowledging our fear as nothing more than the bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts designed to protect us from the ghosts of our past resurgent; we can leave the cage and realise our potential. I do not find it easy, its bloody awkward and uncomfortable, going against my survival instincts.

To step out in faith, feel the fear and then go on anyway would be what I call an act of real courage.

And, here’s a fact for you – Keep knocking and eventually a door will open.

Love, Henry