What Would You Do if You Weren’t Afraid?

“Don’t be afraid to be amazing.” – Andy Offutt Irwin

The other evening we noticed a female hedgehog had just given birth to three babies in a hidden away corner of the outdoor kitchen. This is in Italy, just to give you more context, where it can be more comfortable to make pizza in your outdoor oven. Being a countryside location, you get to see all kinds of wildlife in these parts. Incredibly, these three baby hoglets who were probably born no more than a week or two ago, were walking around unbothered by 5 of us cooking and cleaning in the kitchen. Their eyes were barely open and they zipped around our feet, clearly not yet having developed fear for humans, or much else. And that was an amazing thing to see.

It got me thinking about whether having fear is a good thing or not. Obviously it can keep us safe. But it can also hold us back unnecessarily.

I love this quote:

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” – Sheryl Sanberg

Sheryl’s quote is simple yet profound because it exposes the fact that it really is fear that mostly stops us doing what we would like to do. Remove it and we have every reason to pursue our goals and create our dreams. The question is,?do we actually want to?

I discovered during the course of my career, helping people get past their self limitations, that fear is not the only reason why people don’t move forward with what they truly want to create for their life. I’m going to include myself in amongst them too, because I resisted and delayed over getting started on numerous ambitions and desires. And that’s how I know that when we talk about all the things in our way, it’s usually a bunch of excuses that disintegrate when you unpack the fear. When you uncover what really scares you, you get to see it’s about a discomfort of one thing. The?unknown.

Don’t get me wrong, the unknown is scary. After all, we don’t know what we don’t know. So how do we prepare for it, mitigate it, protect against it? What we do when we face the unknown is pull back, avoid, contract and play small. We limit the possible consequences. Because we assume that the unknown is something negative and potentially even threatening.

But that also means putting up barriers to anything with a potentially positive outcome. If we don’t have prior experience of it, it gets put into the ‘unknown box’ too and then shoved away into the attic of our minds. It’s not easily possible to relate to an amazing outcome when we don’t recognise ourselves in it.

So for many people, removing the fear doesn’t necessarily pave the way to be able to create their dreams. What are we then afraid of? Ourselves. We don’t know if we are capable of coping with success. We can’t relate to that successful identity. It seems like a fictional character, unreal. It’s far easier to relate to the unaccomplished version of ourselves where we have much more experience and familiarity.

So I believe, that when we answer what we would do if we weren’t afraid, we need to go a bit further than just daydreaming about the goals that we currently hold out of reach because of our fears. We need to do two things:

We must firstly remove the fixation on fear itself, because that is what we are triggered by when we visualise the hurdles that scare us. But fear is just a feeling based on thought. It’s not a real monster hiding under the bed. It’s not a physical object. It’s a?feeling?and we can overcome feelings.

And the second thing we need to do, is get familiar with our successful selves. The persona we cannot completely imagine being. It’s really important to walk in their shoes and allow ourselves to imagine being that high achieving identity. And it’s also useful to see the steps we must climb to reach their way of thinking. Because there is no way that we think in the same way now.

If you get uncomfortable just by thinking about what you would do if you weren’t afraid; if the very question makes you confused or avoidant, it’s a sign. You’ve just hit against one of the biggest reasons you haven’t achieved what you really want. You don’t believe it because you don’t recognise it. And you’re identifying with a fraud more than your real self.

Pimmi Pande, August 2023.

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This weekly newsletter is formed with carefully crafted posts designed to help readers achieve their success goals with clear cut direction. For those interested in creating more abundance in their lives, the posts motivate readers to adopt a necessary way of thinking with effective practises. These are all based on the experiences of the author.

Pimmi Pande has spent well over twenty years observing the behaviours, practises and characteristics of successful individuals, and those who aspire to be, and assisting individuals in creating fulfilling, successful, lives. A key focus is on how people think and communicate. Pimmi has used the results of research and experience from working in the Film & TV industry, and as a writer, to create communications and mindset practises to great effect with her international clients over the years. Much of the writing shared in this publication is a direct result of this work.?

She now mentors groups and individuals, guiding them towards how to live consciously while achieving more. She also offers motivational speaking opportunities, commissioned writing, and is available for interviews.?

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