How to Do What You Don’t Know How to Do
Day #4 of Fear, Self Trust and Learning to Tell a More Hopeful Story
Life has brought me to the point where I have to do something I don’t want to do, nor do I know how to do.
It seems so easy. Everyone does it. Why do I hesitate to take action? Because I might do the wrong thing. Or what I do, might not work.
My fears tells me all about all the things that are likely to go wrong.
Fear tells me every wrong thing is the worst mistake I could make, the one that I will never recover for forgive myself for. Fear is a bit of a drama queen.
Fear tells me I will feel humiliated, vulnerable,feel stupid and irrelvant and that is painful.
Fear jeers at me” Just who do you think you are to offer anyone any advice when you make the worst and most obvious of mistakes?
Fear tells me I am at mercy of things I can’t control, can’t really understand and definitely can’t overcome. Fear tells me to give up before I begin.
When faced with something fearful, our bodies respond with an infusion of adrenaline that gives us the ability to fight what we fear, to flee or escape what we fear, or to freeze, to such an extent that we appear dead.’
I’ve heard it said that some people faced with a crisis, such as a fire, run toward the flames — their instinct is to take action. Some people call for help. Their instinct is to call for reinforcements. And then there are those like me. My response is to freeze, to go blank, to leave my body when my mind gives me know way out.
Fear Immobilizes
How to you do what you don’t know how to do?
How do you find the courage to become someone different?
To Unfreeze Yourself from Fear:
1) Dive in to What You Love
Find something that you love. Treat it as a seed. Plant it. Nurture it. Dive deep so as to explore and know it better. It doesn’t matter what you love. It could be reading mysteries, or dressing up, or, spending time with cats.
Find the moments in your day where you feel good and create more of those moments.
2) Find a New Slant
Do what you know how to do but in a new way.
If you are a painter, try a new medium.
Learn another language to shake up your sense of reality. Travel for me was always the way that I made my reality bigger.
Allow yourself to be seduced and bewitched by something that sparks your imagination.
3) Act Out of Character
To do something you don’t know how to do, you must become someone else for a time, perhaps the opposite of the you you feel most comfortable being.
If you are loyal to certain identity — for example, being “good,” you may need to try breaking the rules you’ve been following. Do the opposite. Try small things, like not apologizing for a whole day. Imitate a quality of someone you admire. If you are serious, memorize and tell a joke or two.
Don’t do what you do habitually: Go a different direction. Read or watch something you find boring, or intimidating. Talk to a whole bunch of strangers.
When you do something different, strange, unlikely, a little uncomfortable, you begin to see the scope of what you are capable of, and the “you” you believe yourself to be suddenly has more room to move and you know you are not stuck.
Real Movement doesn’t involve either winning or losing.
Perhaps the greatest lesson for me in this, is that you can try a lot of little things. Fear tells you every choice is an all or nothing, win or lose proposition, of monumental proportions. If you get it wrong, you lose everything.
What if fear could be overcome with the willingness to try something small and see what happens?
