Leadership one step at a time

Have you noticed how the place in your stomach that contracts when you experience fear is the same place where you experience excitement? We ultimately decide in our minds whether we feel thrilled or whether we are scared. The feeling starts where many feelings originate. And what if we decided that this feeling in the stomach and beating heart was not fear, but the sign of excitement with butterflies in the stomach, as when we fall in love? Do we actually have an opportunity to stop indulging our anxiety and choose to embrace a new opportunity?

I was struck one day when my son decided to experience jumping from a plane with a parachute. He went within the space of a couple of days from sheer excitement and joy to paralyzing fear, and back to thrill once he did it, ready to do it again. I realized the power of aligning our thoughts with our emotions to actually make things happen or stop dead in our tracks.

Let us look briefly at our beliefs. There is nothing wrong with being afraid, provided that it does not stop us from doing what we feel excited to do. Leadership in our lives has a lot to do with feeling comfortable with our level of fear. Mostly, it is about aligning our thoughts and emotions. Reframing things in our mind can go a long way in changing our emotional state. We can create new connections by choosing new thoughts. We often assume that leaders are fearless people. In reality, anyone can cultivate the ability to feel the fear and do it anyway. Just think that you may just be excited…

If it is important to change your mental state from resistance to openness, it is equally important to create new experiences, overcoming fears step by step, through a gradual process, repeating the experience until a level of comfort takes root. Do you recall learning to swim, or to ride a bicycle? You may have felt fear at first, but as you learned and grew more comfortable, the fear turned to excitement.

In other words, it is not the absence of fear that determines leadership! It is the ability to realign our thoughts with our emotions, and practice this realignment over and over again, becoming in charge of life running through our veins.

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