Scary

Do one thing every day that scares you. 

Eleanor Roosevelt

The past few days I have been doing things that scare me. Tasks I have put off for fear of not getting it right, failing, dealing with people I do not enjoy, being seen or simply not wanting to do the activity.  I have been hyper-aware of my avoidance, but unable to move on any of it. At night I would climb into bed and paste a mental sticky note that tomorrow I would get it done.

What suddenly changed? I do not know if it was sudden as I have been parsing my unwillingness for a bit, but I did have a friend come to visit who does counseling, coaching and DeMartini work. We spent a day talking, each of us sharing what was going on in our lives, catching up on plans and willingly being vulnerable to places we knew we were stuck. 

He offered to help me collapse the beliefs that were bothering me. I cleverly took him up on his offer. What I thought I needed to focus on turned out to not be what I needed at all.  It so often happens, and I love it.  I did the work on what I thought was my biggest issue and it lifted some of the of the blockages. The bigger gift was that this process set my mind in motion in other ways. The subconscious is a delightful thing if you let it do its work rather than constantly bombarding it with those pesky conscious thoughts. 

The next morning, he asked me to read a bit from a book he is writing.  It is about how you can change things in two minutes and how to get into action.  At this point it is a work in progress, but the skeleton of it is there and somehow, without my noticing it, the action piece landed in my subconscious and mixed with the insights from the day before. 

I had no conscious thought about the combination of events, I was just suddenly in action.  The action component was not even in my awareness.  To quote another friend, “I was simply taking my I don’t want to along.”

So, here I sit on the other side of a group of scary things.  The pile is still there, but for the first time in quite a while, I believe that I can winnow it down to nothing. The problem with the pile, however, is it refills with other life adventures, but maybe the new ones won’t be as scary, or I will just be braver.