Taking the Leap - Part 1

Everyone wants to succeed, no matter what they pursue, but the secret to success doesn't lie in the how much you want to succeed, it lies in how hard you are willing to work for the success. You will never change where you are by continue doing what got you there. You must be willing to sacrifice your comforts and do what the people around you aren't willing to do.

This is all common sense. Yet there always seems to be something holding us back.

Illusions

There always seems to be problems that stop us from moving forward, limitations that hold us back, but I believe that these limitations are, just like the limitations created from fobias, nothing but illusions. Just like the limitations created from fobias, these illusions are also created by an irrational fear. The fear of failing.

Although seldom considered a fobia, I believe the fear of failing to be the main fobia, the main irrational fear, controlling our society. It makes us afraid of speaking in public, make us need alcohol to be able to approach a person we're attracted to and stops us from pursuing our goals.

The reason why failing is a fear plaguing everyone, I believe, is biological. We are group living animals, we live in hierarchies (even when we try to deny it) and we feel that failing will make us fall in the social hierarchy. But just because an emotion is biologically triggered in us, and is something we probably won't be able to be fully free of, it doesn't mean that we can't control it. Courage isn't the absent of fear, but the ability to face them.

The excuses holding us back

What differentiates the fear of failing from other fobias is that people suffering from other fobias generally are aware that their fears are irrational, where as people afraid of failing generally rationalize their fear by creating excuses they call needs.

These needs generally are the need of help from others, the need for money or equipment, or the need of someone giving us more knowledge.

If we look deeper at these "needs" we start to see the irony in that what we say is stopping us from moving forward are the things we call "help", or that the search for more knowledge is like trying to learn how to swim while staying on dry land, or that if the need of money or equipment was real there would never be anyone who worked themselves "from rags to riches". 

Always keep in mind that help is only help if it helps us to move forward. If it's stopping us it is a bottleneck, a problem we need to solve. And notice I wrote we and not others. If we take another look at these "needs" we also start to see that they all tend to be external. They are never about us.

Having Responsibility is Having Freedom

If we think that what we need are external factors outside of ourselves, we are only making excuses. We are trying to spread the responsibility so that if we fail, the failure isn't only ours. But freedom and responsibility always go hand in hand. By spreading, and diluting, the responsibility we also dilute our freedom by creating limitations and bottlenecks we can't control.

When external factors are bottlenecks we truly need to solve, the answer to those problems always lie within ourselves. The goal may be to change someones opinion, to convince them to work with us, but the real problem, and hence answer, always lies in ourselves. We are the ones who need to convince others to help, and if we can't get others to help us, we are the ones who need to find a plan-B to move forward, or a plan-C or a plan-D.

This has been the first part of "Taking the leap". The next part will be posted next week.

Thank you for taking your time to read this post!
Peter Hertzberg