The Internal Dance with Fear and Ambition.
No matter how committed I am to growth, I am merely a mortal, filled with his own limitations, just like the next person.
We all have moments when our environment stops matching our ambition, and sometimes, we don’t even notice the ceiling that’s been quietly closing in. On the one hand, we start with ambition, which creates a ceiling for ourselves that we often perceive as a dream state. On the other hand, our minds dictate how we think and act daily, and we rarely check in to see if we are honoring that true ceiling we initially set.
Last month I sat down with Colin Henderson — a coach, speaker, and high performer who left behind a top sales career to chase what truly mattered most to him. Like me, Collin believes we all have a potential worth pursuing, and he is pounding the streets and speaker stages to highlight the mental conditioning required to make this happen.
Conversations like this that I had with Collin (you can hear it here) are the reason I started my podcast and why I love discussing and navigating the human experience. And, while our points on perspective, mental conditioning, and self-value were filled with relevance and insightfulness, the realist in me had to explore how I am doing with this.
There was an insight Collin made that has sat with me since – “Your Desire to Improve Must Be Stronger Than Your Fear.” The reason why? I think I have a lot more fear than I have been willing to accept, and a lot of it pertains to my own ceiling.
I fear that I might be less ambitious than I have been trying to push myself to be.
It is a fascinating mental dance that I consistently find myself in. My therapist of almost 9 years has taken the brunt of it as I pontificate on all that is possible based on all that has been. I often have such clarity for the potential of my business, my family time, my spiritual growth, my health, my speaking career, my podcast, my golf game, my travel goals, my writing, my cooking, and my “me time” (wait, none of that was “me” time?).
And yet, much like the Louisiana Spring-Summer-Winter-Spring season this time of year, the transition from clarity to roadblocks and back is as routine as the 45-degree temperature shift I experience daily down here in the Bayou.
When I think about fear, my mind looks at things through a physical lens instantly.
Physically, I don’t have many fears. I’m just about willing to consider any physical task I deem a good use of my time. Having put multiple lifetimes of mileage on my body during my swim career it has made me immune to considering the impossible. I make no room for excuses in that department; I make the time, protect it, and optimize what my body has left in it.
What I miss about those swimming days was the black and white nature of performance. You knew what was fast. You knew what wasn’t. Work hard, work smart, get better, and swim fast.
They were simpler times.
As I look at life now, no matter where I lie on the ambition scale on any particular day, what counts as good enough is nothing but a big bag of ambiguous grey.
For me, it is in the grey where the fear is able to take hold and reign free.
In this grey, I am allowed to be comfortable, especially when success really can’t be defined. Like it really can’t. These ceilings of potential and ambition I set for myself are not standards of success; they are figments of my imagination at best. But once I start hypothesizing, planning, and acting toward what is possible, my mind can’t help but perceive these initial ambitions as my new definition of success.
And fear seeps in.
Am I committing to something beyond me? Can I really be sure this is what I want? What will it mean if I can’t achieve this? How big of an investment will this be and is it worth it?
They sound like doubts and avoidance tactics, but those are just protective words for the fear that reigns over me in such moments.
Therein lies the weekly dance between my ambition and my fear, with the result presented in my personality traits of procrastination, ADHD, and escapism.
It is not that I don’t believe in myself, because I do. It is not that I don’t believe in my ideas, because I do. And it is certainly not that I don’t respect and relish the pursuit of the ceilings I put out there, because I genuinely love the chase!
It simply reinforces the work that goes into mental conditioning and the lifelong marathon of training and the challenges that come with it.
Just like with any sports season, you train, store the hay in the barn, trust the work, and go out and perform. Then you go back and start all over again for the next season.
The fact is, ambition is the cause of starting a new mental conditioning season every time you have a new Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and sometimes you can be training for multiple BHAG’s at one time!
One dance toward one BHAG is challenging enough. I just happen to live in a headspace where the music keeps playing, the dancing keeps going, the conditioning is in high demand, and the fear becomes more prevalent.
I must remind myself not to be afraid to dance.
I must remind myself not to be surprised when I am afraid.
This dance with fear might just be the greatest form of conditioning we all need.