Don’t let fear decide your future

At no point in our development does anyone teach us that difficult feelings are a significant part of the human experience and that it’s normal to have them. And more importantly, how to feel difficult feelings until they pass.

The primitive part of the brain is hardwired to fear difficult feelings. Discomfort, after all, could lead to danger. In primitive times, that was certainly true.

Today, the vast majority of the difficult feelings we experience are due to our own thoughts at the time, not due to actual impending danger.

But the primitive brain doesn’t know the difference.

Which is why many people navigate through life avoiding difficult feelings at all costs.

• They don’t get the degree, for fear of failure.
• They don’t apply for the promotion, for fear of rejection.
• They guard their heart for fear of the pain of losing someone.
• They don’t allow themselves to learn something new, for fear of the embarrassment they might feel as a beginner. 

Living life on default means letting fear decide your future.

Feelings are neither forever nor fatal. They come from thoughts - thoughts that are probably unexamined, possibly untrue and perhaps unhelpful.

Given the loss of your spouse, you’ve already felt the most profoundly difficult feelings. Don’t let fear of comparatively minor feelings dictate your future.

On the other side of discomfort is what you want for yourself in this life after loss. It’s what you deserve.

Go after it.

Consider yourself a person who is good at feeling uncomfortable feelings- a graduate of the school of hard knocks. That person is decisive and intentional. She invests in herself and her future. She is self-sufficient and certain.

She decides her next steps; fear does not.

She is you.

If you can’t shake the fear, I get it. It took me years to do so. But it doesn’t have to take that long for you. Inside Life Reconstructed, my coaching program for widowed people, I teach in a matter of months what took me 6 years to learn. Click below to learn more.