Many situations in life make us to do something we find scary or uncomfortable. We are then forced to display emotional courage by stepping outside our comfort zones and do what we know is right or healthy despite how the situation makes us feel. Unfortunately, our natural instincts tell us to avoid the situation or procrastinate, or to find excuses that allow us an exit the situation, so we continue avoiding.
There is a problem with avoiding these situations. Every time we avoid something, that very thing automatically becomes scarier in our minds. These things we avoid end up having an impact on our careers, relationships, or friendships because we’re unable to voice concerns or dissatisfactions. In addition, avoidance weakens our edge or in more eloquent words our emotional resiliency. Our edge comes from overcoming challenging situations, not from avoiding them. Avoiding these situations prevent us from growing and reaching our full potential.
Tackling these difficult hurdles requires us to sharpen our emotional edge. What does this mean? Sharpening your edge requires us to take control of our emotions. These brief moments happen all the time, they are a pivotal instant in time in which we either decide to take action or not take an action. For example taking out the trash or stuffing it to the brim even though your heart says its time for the trash to be taken out. You get the opportunity to do what you know is the right thing. That voice in your head either gets stronger in that moment or weaker. If you feed the voice and do what is right the voice will get stronger. So in that next moment when we need emotional courage the voice in your head is harder to ignore. The more you feed the positive the harder it will be to ignore the voice. However, the inverse is true as well. The beautiful thing is you get the chance to choose daily which voice we are going to feed.
Four Ways to Sharpen Your Edge
The following suggestions are ways to minimize your fear and apprehension before and during critical moments that require emotional courage so you can maximize your chances of taking action.
1. Don’t overthink it: If the voice in your head speaks it, listen. The more you ruminate about whether you should, the scarier the idea becomes.
3. Commit yourself ahead of time. Scared of going to the gym because you’re out of shape? Make an appointment. You’re much more likely to go once you have an actual person waiting for you. Also, Voicing intentions will make you more likely to follow through.
4. Find an accountability partner: Recruit a friend to do it with you. Interacting with another person is a tried and true way of managing fear and anxiety
6. Ask Yourself How It Will Feel Tomorrow. When something scares us and we tackle it, we tend to feel a rush of confidence, empowerment, motivation, and determination immediately after. If we quit then the feelings are exactly the opposite. You get to chose how you feel tomorrow.