Just Start
I’ve always had too many fears all my life. One of them was what if I don’t succeed. What if I fail? The feeling of living in an oblivion, allowing your fears to thrive due to a never-ending thought process is not easy to describe.
Every time I thought of taking action against my fears, I was taken a back by another fear. More than failure itself, I had a bigger demon ruling my mind and that was a web of thoughts making my fears grow. After a multitude of past failures, I couldn’t accept the fact that if I tried, I could succeed as well. My brain started accepting this as well so I ended up not trying to overcome this at all.
Soon after the pandemic started, the frequency of such thoughts in an idle mind multiplied at an alarming rate. I was losing my sanity. That is when I decided to take corrective action. I knew the path would be really hard as I had a brain feeding on negative emotions for really long enough but I also knew my intent would matter the most in getting rid of all this. All I had to do was just start.
I got the opportunity to join Amal Academy for its fellowship program and I navigated through my options of overcoming my fears. Honestly, a few testimonials sounded really promising. I told myself too that I had to get rid of all what my brain was cooking and the first thing I had to shove off was my fear, the fear of failure which always held me back!
I broke down my goals with time frames. I realized not everything could be done all at once. I had to take the 1st step with the faith of getting to a better end as well!
My 1st goal was to eradicate my fear of failure within the period of the fellowship. While this may sound very naive, it had an entire story behind.
I set tasks to follow, to make my goals achievable and specific.
Overcoming the fear of failure.
Task 1: Tell myself everyday in the mirror, looking in my eyes that I can do it, only if I try it. While this may sound irrational to a few, but it’s psychologically proven that one’s brain acts in a certain way. If you train your mind strong enough, it controls a lot of your fears itself. This was one of the mindfulness exercises as well. While it has only been a week, I hope to keep this practice for long enough to see a change.
Task 2: Accepting new roles in a group
For my fellowship, we had a learning group task comprising of 4 members. I tried taking initiative to speak and engage the members in a meaningful discussion. Taking an initiative meant me getting out of my comfort zone and taking the lead. Be it 4 or 40, taking a start has been hard for me, so I tried to overcome that. I aim to follow this throughout the fellowship and be an active participant, also pushing my fellow fellows to take initiative for themselves. This will enable me to work on my interpersonal skills as well.
Task 3: Challenging myself to do something new
While this may sound very generic, my focus right now is the fellowship. I tell myself to do anything new everyday for 3 months. The urge to learn will make me aware of so many things already eradicating my fears, one by one. In the long term this will promote a mindset of learning and failing and not fearing it.
It’s a long way to go. Perseverance, grit, passion to learn and hard work to work on myself will allow me to cross one hurdle a day but I really hope it’s worth.
