Leaning In
We’ve all felt that yearning deep inside of us pulling us towards a dream or a goal. Maybe it’s a whisper or maybe it’s a shouting that keeps us up at night. For me, it started out as the quietest whisper that bellowed out into a wake-up call every morning. “Write!”, it would shout. “Write?”, I would ask with my foggy morning brain and messy hair. I brushed it off as a remnant of a dream that I could not remember. The longer I brushed off this call to write, the louder the yearning got, leaving me more and more unsettled.
The only thing that brought me ease was to start writing; but I was afraid. Afraid of criticism, afraid of not saying the right thing, afraid of not being understood.
Isn’t this what holds most of us back from following the pull that we feel inside of us towards what we feel we are meant to do? The fear of failure, the fear of judgement, or the fear of change? We allow this fear to hold us back and keep us in the dull discomfort of unease. Our brain tells us that we are safe here; low risk. Our spirit feels caged and stuck; causing us anxiety, depression, or just a general state of discontent.
What I learned from starting to write is that you don’t need to go from 0 to 100 overnight. You are allowed to lean in to your dreams and experiment or play. After all, your dreams should be hard work but, nonetheless, fulfilling. If it is not then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate if it’s really your dream. Just kick the ball towards the hill a little and start to see where it takes you. Whether it is by researching the first steps, reaching out to others who have achieved something similar to your dream, or finding a soundboard to bounce your ideas off of, you can calm your fear by dipping your toe into the water and starting with the prep stage.
For me, the first step was just researching how to set up a blog. To borrow an expression from Mel Robbins, my brain did not pull the emergency break on research. The next step was to set up the blog. My fear didn’t have any objections. Finally, the time came to actually write the first blog post. I can feel my worries start to build their arguments but at this point my logic can take over and my belief in my own capabilities is stronger than my fear. I’ve made it this far so I might as well keep going, right? It’s in these small steps that we achieve the goals that we have burning inside of us.
By leaning into our dreams, we leave extra space for ourselves to grow, adapt, and even change our minds along the way. We give ourselves confidence and the acceptance that while what we make may not be perfect, it is ours.
