“Within you is a fountain of wisdom. And you sell yourself short every time you allow some authority to define your limitations and cage your potential. Even if that authority lives in your head.” –Vironika Tugaleva
I have cramps, there is something happening in my stomach. Ohh, it’s so scary. Let me emphasize: I’M AFRAID.
Why?
I’m afraid because I’m exposing and I’m afraid of what people will think of me. I’m afraid I’m mediocre and that my writing will be superficial. I’m afraid I will be ridiculed.
I’m simply afraid and I can’t even find all the reasons I feel this way. But I know that for many years I allowed this fear to control me.
To block me.
To whisper to me that I’m not good enough and it’s pointless to even dare to write something and, even more, post it on a blog.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve written before. Actually, one of my former jobs was writing every day, 8-9 hours a day…sometimes more. And I did it every day for almost a year and then had another job that among other things consisted of writing and writing and writing.
I worked as a grant proposal writer and then I worked as a program coordinator and an important part of my job was to write reports for the funder. And I wrote a few reports, thousands of words. When I started my job as a grant proposal writer I felt the same: fear, anxiety, and this agonizing feeling I won’t be as good as my colleagues that knew so well what they were doing and that wrote so many concept notes and developed so many projects.
It’s been 6 years since I’ve been telling myself that one day I will do my own blog. Every time I was finding an excuse on why not starting.
Most of the times I repeated myself that making a blog is for techie people, the ones that know coding and all these kind of stuff that for me seemed almost impossible to decrypt.
Until one day, when I accepted a challenge: 5 days code challenge. And I loved it. It was wow. Then I started looking for online courses on developing a WordPress blog.
Hahaha, you know already!
To make a blog with WordPress you don’t need to know coding. Well, if you want to make it very fancy and all customized it’s good to have some coding skills otherwise, with some instruction, isn’t rocket science and you can do it without coding.
Here I’m. After some online courses, I created a blog. I know I want to improve it and I also know, now, that I can learn this.
EVERYTHING IS LEARNABLE!
All that our minds can ideate, our minds can create. Deep down, I knew it. My life experience taught me this. The reasons I didn’t listen to my soul are unknown, at least for the time being.
I started quite a few articles but I let them unfinished and I re-read them a few dozen times. Every night, since I decided concretely to start a blog and actually fill this blog with articles, I was reading in my mind what I previously wrote. I was looking for synonyms, I was rephrasing, I was deleting…I was saying I can’t post something like that. Sounds stupid, who will gonna be interested?!
Bottom line is that I needed courage.
“Without bravery, we would never realize the scope of our own capacities and our lives will most probably be smaller than we want them to be.” –Elizabeth Gilbert
We have to take the risks because, in the end, the greatest expense is a lost opportunity.
The other day I came across a story that gave me some kind of boost.
The story is called The power of belief and goes like this:
“A tourist was passing by the elephants and he suddenly stopped confused by the fact that these huge creatures were being held by only a small rope tied to their front leg. No chains, no cages. It was obvious that the elephants could, at any time, break away from the ropes they were tied to but for some reason, they didn’t. The tourist asked a trainer why these beautiful, magnificent animals just stood there and made no attempt to get away.
He was told that when they are very young and much smaller, the trainers use the same size rope to tie them and, at that age, it’s enough to hold them. As they grow up, they are conditioned to believe they cannot break away. They believe the rope can still hold them, so they never try to break free.
These animals could at any time break free from their bonds but because they believed they couldn’t, they were stuck right where they were.”
How many of us go through life hanging onto a belief that we cannot do something, simply because we failed at it once before or because seems so scary and hardly achievable?
What was your biggest fear and how did you overcome it?