What are you afraid of when you think about this coming year?

Perhaps a weird question to ask about planning your future.
However, that’s where most people really go to the theatre of their mind.

I’m curious, given the opportunity to think about what might happen in your future, where does your default thinking instinctively take you?

I have noticed that most people go to what they fear rather than to what they hope for.

If they even have the self permission to really hope for something that is (but that’s an idea for another conversation).

What if having fear is not necessarily a bad thing.

I believe our fears hold some of our most valuable insights if we are open to discovering them. Some of those insights have the potential to change your life, even bring about the resource you need to achieve your goals and manifest your dreams.

So what you are doing about your fears, still running away from them?

Most people have developed sophisticated coping mechanisms to deal with them. Some of them conscience strategies. Many, if not most, have become unconscious tactics that kind of ‘take over’ control of your responses in the face of what you fear.

In the Mindvalley podcast that I was listening to on my run around Rosendal this morning, the speaker Srikumar Rao, suggests that we ‘date our fears’.

Uh, wait a minute, what was that … take your fear on a date?

But that would mean that I would have to suspend my trusted coping mechanisms for a moment...

That would mean I would have to get intimate, even vulnerable, with the thoughts and feelings within me. Uhm, these are the ones that until now I have been pushing away...

That might mean if I am open to it, that I get to discover something about the meanings I have given to past experiences, and the assumptions I project on to future events that haven’t even happened yet...

That could even mean that I learn something about myself, my thinking and feeling, my beliefs and values, realizing that some of them are the very ‘thing’ holding me back from realizing my hopes and dreams...

When I got up this morning I did not feel like running. Mostly because my body is still tight from getting back into my health and fitness routine. In a moment I feared that the run would really hurt.

At the same time, I was aware of the pain and stiffness my body would experience if I didn’t go through with the run. As I write this I’m so glad I took that fear out on a date and went for the run.

When I think about my hopes and dreams for the year ahead, I’m my personal life, my professional practice, and my business ventures, I experience much the same.

I wonder when you think about the year ahead, do you see the beautiful country laid out in front of you like something that fell off a painting, or are you taken by the anticipatory storms possibly brewing in the tempest skies above?