#IKB: I Know Better...Fear

I am my own worst enemy.  I sabotage myself all the time, and the worst part of it all is that I oftentimes have very good "reasons" for it.  It is the worst form of cowardice..."justified" cowardice.  It requires that I blame others, my life, my job, my circumstances, instead of taking a deep, powerful, and, yes, terrifying look inside myself.  I am a grown man capable of working for what I want.  I have people tell me all the time that they believe in me, so why doesn't that translate into personal belief?

I can't answer that.  As such, I am going to launch a new blogging project for 2018.  For those longtime followers, you may remember the "promises" I made to myself a couple of years back.  This project is similar but with a different focus.  I'll lay it out for you.

The new project is called "I Know Better."  Every two weeks I will work toward identifying something about my life that needs improvement or correction that is the result of a faulty belief.  I do a lot of things in my life that "I know better," and it is time I stop it if I want to live the life I want to lead.  I must live presently enough to understand myself a little bit better and I must work to choose to live differently.  Now, I am hoping for some of these changes to become permanent changes for me and my family.  I'm hoping to start to make a difference in my attitude, my circumstances, and my spirit.  That's the point of the project, but there is also the blog.

The blog is the accountability portion of the assignment.  It will keep me honest in trying to deal with these changes I am starting to make and communicate it outwardly to those around me.  I'm hoping that this kind of public naming will allow me to be held accountable personally.

So...the first #IKB?  Fear.  I need to stop living in fear of failure.  I have had a small business idea for at least two years now, but I have never pulled the trigger on it.   I may have missed my window, but I won't know until I try, so I am going to go out there and give it a go.  I will be posting more about this soon.

The second part of my fear of failure has to do with my creative life.  I have been failing as a writer because I fear I have lost too much time, stayed away for too long, or I just fear I might not have the talent in the first place.  I can't mess around with that line of thinking anymore.  I want to see my creative projects take flight.  I want to work toward something real.  I have things to say that I want to see put out there in the world, so I am going to start writing again.

The final component of my IKB is confronting my fear of failure as it relates to my family.  I am so afraid of failing in my duties as a husband and a father that I don't take the next step.  The problem with this is that I wind up beating myself up about it and becoming a kind of miserable sot for them to be around.  Either way, I'm not doing anyone any favors right now.  I am sitting in a creative slump because I'm worried about what "might" happen if I try.

I need to be done with that.  I will be done with that.  I am setting this course for 2018, and I am keeping my sights set high.  It needs to happen, and I NEED to be the one to make it happen.  So, for these first weeks of 2018, I say "I know better than to be paralyzed by fear."