(REPOST) name your fear

Fear.

This was a BIG topic at the Making Things Happen Intensive, and to be honest...I wasn't prepared for it. 

I had done my homework by making my goals for the year, lists of things I'm saying NO / YES to, and identifying some of my greatest distractions...but none of this stuff involved digging into my fears. 

So there I was, at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the first day of the workshop, forced to take a 15 minute focused break, and make a big list of everything that scared me.

It was hard. The first thing I wrote down was almost "making a list of things that scare me"...

But once I started writing I instantly felt better, because as it turns out, a lot of the things that caused me anxiety or fear were actually things I couldn't control. 

Like infertility. 

Why should I feel fear towards the possibility of having infertility problems? Is it because of the conversations I've had with friends and family members about their own struggles with getting pregnant?

Is it because deep, deep down I'm convinced that no one gets to live their whole life without anything BAD happening to them, and so far nothing really BAD has happened to me, so...maybe this will be it?

I mean...how crazy is that?

How bent-backwards-crazy is that?

Especially when I have no control over it. Absolutely NO control. 

Up to now, I haven't experienced any stress over trying to get pregnant, and I need to keep it that way! A growing fear would probably translate into stress eventually, right?

So I named this fear. I wrote it down in my MTH notebook, and followed it with a "because" statement, just like Lara asked. 

I am afraid of infertility 

because I haven't ever had to do anything hard.

I circled this statement 100 times and then furiously wrote out how CRAZY it was! How UNTRUE it was! 

Even though nothing BAD has happened to me, I've done some hard things. Even though growing my business has kind of seemed second nature to me along the way, I have done some hard things.

I've woken up on a Monday morning with 26 shoots scheduled for that week and felt completely helpless and exhausted beyond words. That was hard. It might not be considered hard in someone else's life, but that's always going to be true!

It wasn't until I said wrote it down, circled it 100 times, and scratched it out completely before I decided to just not be afraid of it anymore. 

BECAUSE it won't make a difference. 

BECAUSE Ryan and I can handle anything life throws at us, together. 

BECAUSE I can't control it.  

BECAUSE I have no reason to be afraid. 

I know I still haven't really elaborated on the Making Things Happen experience in much detail yet, but I am just so excited to be sharing some of these things I learned about myself, in a way that might just cause one or two of my wonderful blog readers to get out a piece of paper, write down their fear, and destroy it. 

The world would be a better place 

if everyone lived like their greatest fear didn't exist.