Facing your fears

    If you keep running from your fears you'll never outrun them, its time to stop wasting your energy running from your fears and redirect it to facing them. By ignoring them you might feel you don't have to deal with them but that is just a temporary solution and one day its going to come back out of the closet you locked it and you might not be very ready. The thing is most times we are too afraid of the idea of our fears that we start having doubts in our mind and we end up running from our goals because we are too scared, we never really analyse and try to find out if our greatest fears are really as bad as we like to believe they are, like a child scared of whats hiding in the closet at night. Take me for example...
       One of my fears was not being perfect. It was really bad, I wouldn't speak out in primary school when questions are asked because I was afraid of missing the answer so I would whisper my answer to my seatmate and if he took my suggestion and failed I would curl up into myself even more, If I was to sing a tune by lets say Phil Collins or Michael Jackson I wanted to sound sensational and have people stare at me in utter amazement but when i finally managed to make whatever sound it was I could cough out i must have ruined everything by then, I killed my self-confidence by myself. Christ I wanted to be so good at anything from the onset before even starting or experiencing it in the first place and as you can guess it was impossible, I doubted myself a lot so I ran from activities and in school when an activity was mandatory that everybody would participate I tried my best to skip so I either got into trouble or showed up and messed the whole thing up, inside me I knew what I was capable of, I knew what I could do behind closed doors when nobody was observing but even the tiny memory of my capabilities was being slowly torn away from me by my fears. I just wasn't trying to learn at all, i was like a junkie and my drug was self doubt fed by my fears. All I did to myself by running from my fears was remain stagnant, I never progressed, never tried anything new i just stuck to what I already knew which wasn't very much, i wasn't improving myself as a person physically, mentally or psychologically. But at a point I had to see what I was doing to myself and the negative effects it had on my development as a person. I had to learn to ask my self "how bad can failure be", so I started from there before I make a move I would tell myself that the best people had to go through this process and had to fail a couple of times to learn, I learnt how to see the good side of failure and I carried on from there.
         
        I still am not where I want to be or where I would have been had I recognized my fears and what I had to do on time but I definitely am a long ways away from where I used to be and I keep improving everyday. The same can apply to you, recognize your fears and start making changes from there, its a gradual process but believe me it is totally worth it. Face your fears cos there is no other way you can win against them. I hope this message helps someone out there in he's/her struggles....