Friday Five - March 25th

This week’s Friday Five is about personal growth and what stops you. What tends to stop most people is fear. Science fiction author Frank Herbert wrote “Fear is the mind killer.” But when you think about it, you’ll discover that fear is the life killer. It eats away at you, swallowing pieces of your motivation, your talents, your time, your energy, your passion, your joy—until eventually you change from the great eagle in flight you might have been to a small flightless bird walking on the ground afraid to lift its head to the sun much less soar among the clouds.

I am faced with fears too: will other people like what I say? Will they like what I do? Will they like me? But these fears are just gremlins: do they really matter? To those of you reading this newsletter, does it really matter if you like me or not? I mean sure, it would be great if you all loved me, but that’s not going to happen. Do you think I’m a bad person if you don’t like what I write? My guess is probably not. Like me, are you afraid people won’t like you if they see who you truly are?

Maybe your fears are job related. Do you worry that you will lose your job if you tell your company what you really think? If that’s the case, is this where you really want to be spending 40 hours out of every week of your life?

Several years ago, my employers told me that I was intimidating, people were scared of me, and that I should learn to tone down my message. Looking back, I believe they told me this because my confidence level was just so much higher than that of the other people I was working with. But because of our combined fears, I made the changes they requested. I didn’t stop to consider the true consequences of acting based on fear. And in the long run, this hurt not only me but the company as well: I wasn’t the asset to them I might have been because I was too afraid that I wouldn’t be liked for who I really was. I am now working to overcome this fear, and you know what? The more I work on this process, the easier and easier things are becoming for me.

So this week’s Friday Five challenges you to think about your fears.

1) What are you fears stopping you from doing?

2) What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

3) What are the true consequences of your fears?

4) What is the worst thing that could happen?

5) What are you going to change?