I wanted to follow up on the article Freedom From Paralyzing Fear with a story from my life. As I talk more about Freedom From Paralyzing Fear you can apply my thoughts to your life. The whole idea is to not let fear freeze you from action and a wonderful future.
[Transcript] Hi I’m Kit Cassingham with Live In Focused Energy.I’m revisiting my article Frozen by Fear (Freedom From Paralyzing Fear, actually) because I came up with more stories, or another story that I’ll tell — there are lots of stories. And more thoughts about why you don’t want to why you can’t let fear freeze you. The story comes from 7th grade gym class.
My gym teacher is pretty cool about getting us involved in a wide variety of activities. We would climb ropes as high as we could, and since we were in the basketball court we had high ceilings. We learned Scottish and Irish jigs, we played baseball, we did all kinds of…pole vaulting, and high jumping, and balance beam, parallel bars, uneven bars.
And I was pretty good at all that stuff. And my gym teacher was taking note of how gymnastic I was so she started working with me on the uneven bars, especially. I was good with flipping around and moving from an upper bar to lower bar around and around… The one thing I couldn’t do was dismount with a flip from the bars. She would try putting a harness on me. She would talk with me, she challenged me. She finally gave up. Part of my excuse was my glasses would go flinging across the room, so she removed that issue by taking my glasses from me — but I just couldn’t do it. My fear froze me.
I don’t know what would have happened with a gymnastics career, but I didn’t overcome that one little thing and it made a difference in how I felt about myself regarding gymnastics. And that was too bad. So be it. Onward and upward.
I’ve kept that memory tucked in the back of my mind for a long time now, so that when I find myself being overcome with fear, I think back “Do you want to repeat that or do you want to move forward?” Sometimes those thoughts are subconsciousness or subliminal even. But I wanted to share the story with you. Little things that could happen when you get frozen by fear.
When we are frozen by fear, it keeps us from having new experiences. It keeps us from experiencing walking across suspension bridges. I know that’s high on your list of things to do , but I got to tell you it’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of different. It keeps us from visiting new countries and experiencing those cultures and languages. It keeps us from experiencing different thoughts. Having an experience with new and unusual foods. It even may even keep us from having new relationships — deeper more profound relationships. It keeps us from learning new skills.
And right now in the COVID lockdown, when we come out of this, depending on how long it goes — but I think I think things have changed…forever in many ways — we have to learn to do things differently. Our businesses have to be different. Our social interactions are going to have to be different. But for your business to be different, you’re going to have to learn those new skills, new ways of thinking and being. Take it in baby steps. Baby steps are a great way to move forward because each step gives you a little success and that success leads to a bigger success and a bigger and … until you’ve mastered it.
Embrace the changes. Embrace the newness. Embrace the results. And the results may be different thing you had been expecting. And that could be a good thing. You won’t know if you don’t try. And as you are taking baby steps, and as you are experiencing these new things, celebrate. Celebration feeds the brain joy. The brain goes after those things that are joyful. Joy’s not the right word there. It likes…What is the word? Reward. It loves being rewarded. And celebration gives it a wonderful reward.
Yes, experience the fear. Acknowledge it. Address it. And then embrace the change to move through it. You’ll be so glad that you did.
I’m Kit Cassingham with Live In Focused Energy. Embrace fear and move past it. Don’t let it freeze you.