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Fear Is an Opportunist — Stop Letting It Take Over
Sweat dripped from my forehead and my hands ached as I moved yet another box of hydraulic fittings from the uncounted collection I had sitting around me to the shelf.
Mobile phones were still somewhat of a novelty and mine startled me when it rang.
A big change was coming, but I was out of town working and wouldn’t get the full story until the weekend.
All week in Idaho Falls, that phone call ran laps in my mind. I thought about it so much, I started to wonder if I was going crazy. I thought about the implications and my own real and perceived inadequacies.
That call made me afraid of what the future held for me.
It’s a familiar feeling to most of us. A tightness in the chest, mind racing a million miles a minute. My inner voice is never that quiet, and now it was on overdrive.
Don Johnson put it so elegantly:
Before you know it, fear is knocking on our door. It wants to get in. It wants to run the show. It looks for a weakness to exploit to establish a permanent residence in you.
There are, at times, big events in our lives, like the phone call I received, that fling the door wide open for fear to come in. Other times, all it needs is a small crack. Even when you think you’ve locked the door, fear sometimes has a way of making its way in.
And once it’s in, it never wants to sit quietly in the corner.
Fear’s the worst kind of house guest. I wants to rearrange things: your thoughts and your confidence. It makes you question yourself and doubt your choices. Things that might have seemed certain start to feel fragile.
Don Johnson again (because I love his writing):
Fear is a virus that separates us from ourselves, the present moment, peace and contentment. It makes us brittle and smaller, diminishes our capacity to think rationally, and can erode our health and well-being.
He’s right.
More than a few times since starting two businesses, I’ve felt that virus spread through my…
