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Fear. What is it? Can you touch it? Can you hold it? Can you show it to another person? I can almost hear you from where I am sitting. No, no, no. Okay then, so you can't touch it, you can't hold it, and you can't show it to another person. The question then is, why? Why do we have fear? Fear is nothing more than an emotion or a feeling that we hold in our mind. We fear either the emotional or physical pain something may cause. The problem is, these emotions and feeling affect the way we live our lives. We fear doing certain things because we think we might fail. This may be due to past failures we have actually experienced or it may be due to failures we fear we might experience.

I urge you to remember and live by the following motto. Fear stands for,

False
Evidence that
Appears
Real

Most of the time what we fear, we have never even experienced! Isn't that crazy? You see, your mind has a hard time determining whether you've actually experienced the failure or just imagined it. Either way, you feel the physiological symptoms of the fear; such as an upset stomach. Often, because we can imagine some sort of failure, we believe it will come true, and then we don't even try! And that is what makes a failure; a person who is afraid to try because they fear the potential of a negative outcome. If you don't at least try, you can never succeed.

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
- Mark Twain

The question now becomes who defines what 'failure' and 'success' is? You do right? Either you create the definition yourself or you accept someone else's definition. Is it true then that some people create more difficult definitions of success and failure for themselves than others do? You bet it is! Who do you think leads a more successful live, Alex who defines success as, everyday that I wake up and I'm not six feet under, is a great day. Or Jeff, who defines success as, I have to be earning at least million dollars a year before I am successful. You guessed right again. Alex. You see, Alex has created her own definition of what success means and that definition is relatively easy to achieve! Therefore, in her mind, she is successful everyday. Whereas Jeff, as per his own definition, cannot be successful until he is earning one million dollars a year. What are the chances that most of the 'Jeff's' in the world feel like failures on a daily basis because they are not yet earning one million dollars a year? Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that you should not set high standards and goals for yourself. What I am saying is that you have to be careful that you 'happily achieve, rather than achieve to be happy'.

The more difficult your definition of success is to attain, the more fear you will attach to it. Don't let your own definitions limit you. Or even worse, the definitions of others. Create your own definitions to make it harder to feel like a failure and easier to feel like a success. That way you will attach less fear to what you want in life. What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Image what you can do in your life with that type of belief system. Try thinking of every 'failure' as a success. That is, every time you 'fail' at something, you have really succeeded because you have learned what does not work. Therefore, you are closer to succeeding the next time you try. Remember that the past does not equal the future. Yesterday's failure does not equal your future outcomes. Just because you may have failed yesterday, or even five minutes ago, it doesn't mean you are going to fail again. Just learn from what you did wrong and change your approach. Don't fear the past. The past is what has taught you how to succeed in the future. Be fearless!

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Copyright (c) 1999 Glen Hopkins