Hey Guys!
If I did this right, I’m posting this on Star Wars Day. May The 4th, Be With You.
I’ve got a good one for y’all today.
You ever hear those big Self-Improvement folk saying “Feel the Fear, and do it anyway!”?
I sure have, many many many times. It never really worked for me for years until this week when I sought to amend it by adding a crucial piece of information that makes things easier for us:
Feel the Fear, but don’t focus on it. Then do it anyway.
Here’s what I mean:
I’ve been learning about my own Inner Child a lot over the past several months. Therapy, Music about Inner Children, and from other people who know a lot about one’s Inner Child, like one of my favorite spiritual luminaries, Teal Swan! She was born with many gifts, and she went through a lot as a kid, and she pulled herself out of that bad stuff by doing this (among many other things): Tapping into the power of and choosing to love her own Inner Child, which she and I believe to be the internal disguise for our higher selves, the part of you who’s in touch with all your deepest feelings and greatest dreams!
I understand commitments and priorities, I do, but Imma just say it right here: I believe that people should do whatever their heart, their inner child, desires! And the world shouldn’t put all those constrictions and excessive parameters around what that “Should” look like! (This is a free thought zone by the way, guys! Here, we can be ourselves. We can be real about what’s going on as we are now and dream our greatest dreams at the same time. 😄❤️) I think we’d all be much happier getting to do what’s in our heart of hearts to do more. I really do.
Think back to a time, preferably as an adult if you can, when you felt truly alive. Every time you felt that way, or anybody feels that way, we were in touch with our Inner Child! There’s so many things to love about it: no overthought, no second-guessing, no nothing, but the stuff that makes life worth living (as elusive as it can be a lot of the time 😉🫂). I know we’re kidding ourselves when we say we want anything other than The Good Life, whatever that means for each of us personally. It can be elusive, but here’s some Food for thought:
One of my favorite modern Philosophers, Earl Nightingale, famously put it this way: We become what we think about… most of the time. What this means to me is if you get your mindset in a positive place anything more than half the time, you’re gonna get to where you wanna go eventually. It’s a mathematical certainty! In the spirit of that, I’ve found that when I get in tune with and in touch with my Inner Child most of the time during the day, I find myself on a greater trajectory towards whatever things I want.
My key, my queue for getting back in touch with my Inner Child, goes something like telling myself this: “Evan, get out of the head, and feel in your body” I feel the sensations in my body and that grounds me more, puts me back in the present where we can do something about our lives! 😂 In Michael Jackson’s 1991 song off of Dangerous, Keep the Faith, Michael says in the second verse “And you can go by feel / instead of circumstance” except I say “instead of excessive thought.” In that spirit, I abbreviate this process by calling it “Going by Feel.”
What’s helping me to go by feel more than thought is intentionally bringing my attention away from what bad “the system” might do to me and grounding myself in my body’s sensations, which enables me to go by feel, by tapping into my feelings, literally!
After I do that, my Inner Child, I call him Little Evan, is there waiting for the adult me to bring that little guy to my workspace, so I can do whatever I, really we, wish to do, with his power, rather our power, set up to give our all in whatever we’re trying to do.
But again, how does “Feel the Fear, and Do It Anyway” tie into this?
My mom was making a bone broth (yes, a broth flavored predominately by leftover meat bones) today. It’s cooked in a Crockpot, and I sent a text to my family group chat with a picture of the broth cooking saying…
“It all boils down to this!” 🤣
Feeling the fear is important, but if you feel the fear without focusing in on it and instead focusing in on your body’s feelings, it gets you present again, and doubt will start to creep in less and less if you keep trying (and experimenting) with doing this. The first time it’ll be shotty. The second time, less shotty, 4th time, starts to get a little more consistent, and then from the 15th and beyond, it’ll become more and more consistent. Ya’ know what this reminds me of? Smoking! What do these things all have in common? if you apply this process to them, both become a habit! 🤣
All jokes aside, you can try to make it fun, too! Think of it as a challenge to get as many instances as you can of going about the day by feel more than predominately by thought. Don’t be afraid to spice it up!
I watched the Live Event that Matthew McConaughey did last week, The Art of Livin’ with the Who’s Who’s of self-improvement. One of his guests was Self-improvement royalty Tony Robbins. Now, I have notably disagreed with the big man on a few things he preached earlier in his career that he posted online for us to see. This event had shown me that Tony may have learned a few things since the last time.
He shared a scenario with his friend. They were driving in a fast car. For this analogy, think of Tony as your fear and/or worry, and his friend driving the car as your focus driving all your personal resources wherever you wanna go. Anyway, they were headed towards a wall and they had to make a quick turn if they wanted to avoid it. Tony was worried that they were gonna crash, so like any worried man, he shifted his focus towards the danger, the problem, the wall. I don’t blame him, before hearing this, I would’ve wanted to see my death coming, too. I’m sure many of us would! 😂 He was worrying so much that eventually his friend pushed his face away and to the side and swerved the car out of the way at the last minute.
How? Tony’s friend, your focus, was not focused on the wall or any of Tony’s worrisome remarks. He was actually only focused on the solution, and doing that was their ticket out of danger! Moral: Try not to focus as much on the thing that could go wrong as you do on the place that you ultimately want to get to!
And all of this, it’s an everyday practice, I’m finding out! I’m only on Day 2 as I write this! Day 5 now as I’m finishing this!
And also what’s helping me is not thinking of it as a long stretch or marathon. Teal has been teaching me that it’s not like a marathon or a promise to your Inner Child to keep and keep on keeping, it’s more like a decision that any and all of us can make for ourselves, every individual moment of the day, and just making those decisions starting when you wake up with your new energy every day! It’s not like you get those additional decisions to make without a recharge every night! 😊
Feel the Fear,
Focus on body more than mind,
then do it anyway…
Lots easier!
Alright, Love you guys!
Evan