Today I was out feeding pigeons. I never did that before.
I used to be afraid that their beak might hurt me. It seemed to me like they could easily pierce my fingers with their sharp beak .
Instead of listening to my fear, today I went out and fed pigeons anyway. Nothing that I anticipated happened, instead I felt very good for being able to experience that.
I see fear coming along in similar fashion regarding other stuff in life as well. Fear holds us back. The more you get into it, the more you won’t be able to experience good moments.
Fear is a kind of wake up call for me. If I’m afraid of something, it means I should do more of it.
If I’m afraid that people will hate my writing, I put it out more for the general public to see. If I’m afraid of sharing my idea, I share it with everybody. If I’m afraid of speaking, I try and do more of it.
I mostly try and perform activity that scares me. Reason being:
- If I keep doing it, I’ll lose the fear eventually.
- I’ll get to learn that fear has nothing to do with my inner potential.
- I’ll realize that fear is my enemy. And that it doesn’t want to see me succeed. It brings obstacles and hindrance on every footstep. As soon as I give into fear, I lose the game.
- I’ll expand my comfort zone.
I take fear as a guiding principle of my life. It has helped me succeed in various conditions.
I was really afraid of swimming pool before I learned to swim. The first time I set my foot on swimming pool, I thought I had to do more of it because I was afraid of it. If I didn’t have that guiding principle to do more of things that scares me, I would have left the pool to never come back.
However, instead of doing so, I went to the pool everyday and learned to swim.
Now, I’m not afraid as I was before.
I realized that the more I went to the swimming pool, the more confident I became and the fear lessened.
Fear also holds back some potentially wonderful experience. If I was fearful about the pigeon, I wouldn’t have been able to experience the act of feeding it.
If you are afraid to talk to a stranger, you lose out on a potential life long friend. Of course, strangers might ignore you. But you never know until you try. And to try, you need to have courage to speak and ignore your fears.
Never listen to your fears. Keep moving anyway.