On Doing It Scared

What would you do if fear no longer stood in your way? 

This is the basis for Ruth Soukup's new book, do it scared.

I started this book the week my summer vacation began, after seeing it on a friend's social media feed. This friend recently made the bold move to up and purchase a building and open a business. Damn! So yeah, if she's reading stuff like this, then I wanted in, because obviously it packs a punch! And illustrates what is, to me, the best thing about social media - sharing the good stuff!

And let's face it, how often are we not doing what it is we really want to do because it's just too scary? Because we might not succeed. We might fall flat on our faces. Get hurt. Be laughed at. End up in debt. Or, have our entire life change in a much better way. Have it all work out. Watch everything we wanted come together in that beautiful, magical plan the universe always had for us, once we could let go of fear and allow it all to unfold. Because truth is, sometimes the fear of things working out, the fear of  how life might change as a result of that, the fear of just taking an unknown path, it can hold us back as much as the fear of failure... if not more. So we don't even try. We make other choices and tell ourselves this is happiness. We hover in the safe zone.
Until that blows up in our face too, because safe zones have expiration dates, but regret doesn't.

An excerpt from do it scared

Soukup addresses in the work the archetypes of fear, and I recognized myself in a couple. Namely 'The Excuse Maker," and I'm not proud of that, but I also saw bit of myself in a few other archetypes as well. You can take your own assessment here, and I do recommend doing it. There's so much to engage with on her site in addition to reading the book. But I must warn you, if you are a person who battles the grand demon of  "but what if...." then this book has the potential to be life changing. Because as Will Smith's character states in his famous After Earth speech, "Danger is very real. But fear is a choice. We are all telling ourselves a story. And that day, mine changed."

Last week, my story changed. And it's not only from reading the book, it was that little force inside that drove me to ask my friend if I could borrow it. That little voice inside, that's courage. It's not always a bold roar. It's more often the quite little voice that leads us to embark on every single decision we make that carries with it even the tiniest bit of risk, risk that the end result won't meet our expectations. I could go off on another tangent here of the danger of expectations, how they take us out of the moment and prevent us from fully engaging in living...but I won't. Instead, I will end with this question...does always playing it safe really meet the expectations you have for your one and only life?

If your answer is yes, then this book may not be for you.
But if that little voice is speaking to you...
...if there's something you always wanted but have been afraid to really go after...
...if there's some dream still living inside you that you just know you need to try...
...if you handed your story over to fear at some point, and now you want to take back authorship...
then this just might be the book for you!

Happy Sunday!