On the other side of fear…

The other day on my morning walk, I came across three deer. I reached the top of a staircase that leads onto a trail, and I was about to descend when I noticed the deer. When I saw them, I stopped. I didn’t want to frighten them.

Deer fear almost any animal. They tend to jump at the slightest noise. Even when we mean them no harm, deer tend to be wary of humans, and rightly so, since they are also hunted by us. When we approach, they usually raise their heads, prick their ears, and stand very still. It’s how these creatures stay vigilant against predators.

So, these deer looked at me. I could see that they wanted to cross the stairs to the other side and essentially, I was presenting as an obstacle to them. They had no idea whether I was friend or foe. I knew not to touch them, and I reasoned that if I stayed perfectly still and presented no threat, they might move past me up the stairs and continue on the path they were on.

So, I did my best to blend in with the environment and to be as quiet and as peaceful as I could be. These three deer watched me with interest, trying to assess whether it was safe enough for them to proceed or not. Only one of the deer had the courage to move past me to the other side of the trail. It took tremendous courage for her to move past me and she ran out of there as fast as she could. She got through to where she wanted to be, and she was free.

The other two deer continued to watch me. They inched closer. And then I made the mistake of moving. I moved only slightly, but it was enough to frighten them. They galloped in the opposite direction. What was interesting, is they kept looking back to where I was. Probably unsure if I would follow.

I gave them space and then followed a short while after. I found them again a little further down the trail; their initial plan of crossing the stairs to the other trail, long forgotten.

And this whole experience got me thinking. Isn’t this just how we are as humans? We reach a fork in the road of life. We are faced with a transition or a challenge in our lives. We tell ourselves we want to change, and yet we stay frozen right there in the middle of the road, too afraid to take the next step. We consider what might be on the other side. We take a few small steps forward; only to take three big steps back again, when things start shifting.

The other day in a conversation, a prospective client said she was afraid to make the changes we were talking about, and her reasoning was, “Rather the devil you know than the one you don’t know.” And that’s so typical of our human nature. We fear more what we might lose than what we might gain if we make a change. We convince ourselves to settle for what we have. We convince ourselves to tolerate what we no longer want, because we fear change so much. We fear that things might actually get worse if we choose to move forward.

But let’s slow that down for a second. Is that true? If you leave that job that makes you miserable, where you are being underutilised; if you leave that toxic relationship and open yourself up to something more meaningful and truly loving; if you say what needs to be said, if you were brave enough, vulnerable enough to speak your truth, would things really get worse?

And let’s slow it down even further. What if you do nothing? What happens if you do nothing? Play it forward in your own mind, and consider for a second that you continue to endure, that you continue to tolerate, that you continue to simply exist as a mere bystander to your own life, would you really be better off? Or are you actually already creating the very result you say you don’t want?

In conversation after conversation these past few weeks, I’ve asked prospective clients to consider what would happen if they do nothing, if they chose to stay where they are, and they all reached the same conclusion, by doing nothing, they are creating the very thing they say they no longer want.

Then I invite them to consider the absolute worse thing that could happen if they chose to take one brave step forward. And they all tell me the worst thing that would happen is that nothing would change, or they would end up getting the results they have now.

So, for your consideration, dear reader, if the worst result is that you get the same result you have now, then you have NOTHING to lose. At least you get to test it. You get to try something different and possibly get a different result. To the words of that famous quote often attributed to Einstein, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

The truth is that you don’t know that things will stay exactly the same if you take a step forward. You don’t know what will happen. None of us do. What we do know, is that if we stay where we are, nothing changes, and we continue to sit in the stands of our lives and watch it go by instead of being an active participant.

One courageous step forward might change the entire trajectory of your life, and at the very least, you’ll be able to say that you are choosing sanity over insanity. I often tell my clients that I can’t promise them results. I can’t promise them that they will get what they want. What I can promise them is that they will change, and their lives will change in ways they haven’t even considered yet.

That has been my lived experience of being on the receiving end of coaching. I did not get everything I wanted, and I don’t regret a single step of the journey, because I’m fundamentally different to the person I was who took that first brave step four years ago. I have changed so much, and my life has changed so much, and some things came across my path that I had never even considered. In so many ways, my experiences have exceeded my expectations.

And I’m not surprised by that, because I don’t control the outcome. I don’t know all there is to know. This is a partnership WITH life, and life brings me things I could never have imagined when I was in my frozen state of fear, too afraid to take a step forward. Life doesn’t reward our dreams, our yearnings, or our desires. Life doesn’t reward our plans. Life rewards ACTION. When we take the first step, and then the next step, and then the next one, life meets us right there and brings us more than we could ever have imagined.

I’m sure that one deer was truly terrified when she moved past me, and then when she got to the other side, she completely forgot how scary that was, because she was on the other side! She was free! And things looked so much different on the other side.

Rich Litvin always says if it doesn’t scare you a little bit, then you are not dreaming big enough. Our dreams are meant to scare us. And on the other side of fear is everything we want. Fear shows up to tell us to proceed with caution. It’s not asking us to not proceed at all. It’s simply inviting us to consider HOW we proceed, but proceed we must, else life will simply pass us by.

Have you ever watched others do the very thing you are afraid of doing, and found yourself resenting them? Wondering how they did it and why you can’t. I often hear my clients tell me that the person they admire has confidence, and looks like they are not afraid.  And see that’s just our projection of what we believe is true for the other person. No-one does anything worthwhile without a bit of fear. And no-one has confidence when they start out. Confidence is not a prerequisite, it’s a byproduct of getting started.

Consider what resentment really is. In her beautiful book, Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown offers insight into the emotion of resentment. Most people think that resentment is part of the cluster of emotions that fall under anger. It is not. Resentment belongs under the cluster of emotions associated with envy and jealousy. That blew my mind the first time I read that. What I take from that is that essentially, when I resent someone, I envy what they have. I am upset because they have what I want. So, my anger at them actually stems from feeling angry at MYSELF for not taking what I want for myself too. I’m essentially, saying, “But why do they get to have that, and I don’t?”, without realising that no-one is withholding what I want from me, but ME.

I once had a client tell me that she couldn’t do something great in her career, because she lacked passion. The truth was she was afraid to challenge herself. She was afraid to step up and take on a role that would really stretch her. She was afraid that she might fail. So, she told herself she lacked passion, because from her perspective, that is what everyone else had who were happy in their jobs, and what she perceived as the difference between herself and them.

We got to work – one small brave step at a time. She worked on speaking up more, and on doing things that felt uncomfortable and scary. She took on a role that was far more challenging than the one she had. And within six months, she was passionately talking about the work she was doing. I pointed out to her that she had so much passion, and she hadn’t even noticed. It was a byproduct of getting started on something that felt impossible at the time. It was a job that scared her. And she had to put in a lot of work – both internally and externally – to create who she became, and yet, she discovered that what she had admired in others, was alive inside her too. She was withholding it from herself.

I watched her blossom when she stopped listening to her fears, when she unfroze herself, and ran forward. Now she is on the other side, and everything looks and feels different. On the other side is everything she wanted, and more, but she had to have the courage to take that first step forward. She had to have the willingness to risk playing full out and even losing. She had to play the game of life as if she had nothing to lose.

See when we stay in the stands of life, while the game of life is going on; when we choose to take ourselves out of the game, we have already lost, because we never got to play. What’s worse? Playing and losing, or never getting to play? That’s the question to consider. And my invitation is to consider that when you let your fear tell you that it’s too hard, or you can’t do it, you are essentially checking out of your own life and choosing to stay in the stands while the game is being played. Would you rather stay safe and be a spectator to your own life? Or would you rather risk, possibly fail, and at least get to play in the game of life? It’s a choice. We all get to choose whether we dash across to the other side to see what’s there, or whether we stay frozen in place wishing we had the courage to move across to the other side…

References:

Brown, B. (2022). Atlas of the Heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. New York: Random House.