Three words bring fear into our hearts. Change, difference, & doubt. They make us stop in our tracks. Fooling us into being more fragile than we truly are.
They make us hesitate. Watch from the sidelines. Look behind us. Hold on to what we had. When we feel any of these words we become uneasy, unsure, and tentative.
It’s almost as if these are signals for imminent death. What we fail to realize is that they indicate our chance for renewal. To move away from where we have been into new areas, new ideas, and infinite possibilities.
We read books and books about personal change and new starts. Yet when it happens in our own lives it is never so glamorous. In fact, we miss it because it never appears as something new. Doubt, difference, and change are what appear as personal change begins.
To help us overcome these fears we need to have an idea as to where we are headed. We don’t need to know exactly but we need to understand clearly why we are going where we have never been.
Sometimes change is forced on us. When this happens the change feels worse. In this case, we need to really try to understand what is needed that caused this change. We hear over and over that things don’t change if we keep doing the same thing. Never believing this is true.
The important thing is when you find yourself in the midst of doubt, difference, or change, you need to pay more attention to what new things you can learn or that are now present that were not before. Try to reflect on why you feel threatened. There always will be things you don’t like. But there will be new things that if you give them a chance could become very helpful.
All of us deserve renewal. Our lives are too long to go down one simple path. Sometimes life changes things, sometimes those around us change things, and sometimes we wander or stumble or decide to change things.
In all of these cases, when they first occur you need to fight your instinct to run with the wisdom of understanding that it is just the first step in a new journey. Embrace doubt, difference or change with hope and never fear.