Brave New You!
January’s issue of “O, The Oprah Magazine” stares us straight in the face with Oprah, a Lion and how to tame your fears to start living your happiest year yet! Talk about power!
You go into the New Year with great inspiration, new goals and expectations along with being the best you ever! You set resolutions … on weight, more work/life balance, greater joy! You garner the energy every day to put one foot in front of the other for this new YOU! Is this you?
So what happened last year?! You did the same thing last year and the year before and the year before … and nothing has changed. You are still dragging your body out of bed everyday struggling with finding meaning to your life, trying to find YOU time and not just work time. So, why haven’t you been able to keep the resolutions and energy to accomplish new things in your life?
The #1 thing that stops you is FEAR! Fear of change. Fear of not being good enough for any changes. Fear of losing something, even if it losing the “YOU” you know now!
The thing I first want to address with this topic is “how does fear show up in your life”? Fear will always be with you and it is important to understand how fear shows up in your life. Most of us see fear as being those times when our heart is racing, we can barely breathe … the moment of fight or flight. This is the most common way that fear shows up today.
Another, and more likely way, that fear shows up is as anxiety, doubt, and worry. Or, a more seductive form is through a feeling of exhaustion, zoning out, or shutting down and just not dealing with something. That is a common way for fear to show up for you, and yet you don’t know it as fear! How many times in your life were you so exhausted that you could barely get out of bed? Or you just zoned out and shut down: in front of the TV, mind numbingly doing nothing. This is what fear can look like for some people.
It appears as exhaustion because you can’t even begin to deal with the emotional state that fear will put you in. You have learned to tune it out to avoid feeling the unpleasantness. Whatever is going on for you (financial problems, relationship problems, potential of losing a job, etc.), you choose to shut down instead.
How do you deal with—and not avoid—the fear that comes up in your life?
First, you need to understand how your fear shows up for you and that when you feel fear; it is an opportunity to grow. You are being asked or pushed to go beyond our comfort zone and to grow in these times of fear.
This is a time of choice: to stay stuck … or go beyond your suffering in comfort, so YOU can begin to live life on your own terms.
Next week, I will take you through the R.O.A.R. process so you can learn to Tame Your Fears through ROAR.