A new blog reader recently e-mailed me. He asked:
How do you determine when to live daringly and is it always easy to say yes to anything? I think I understand that it is not, but I am curious how you determine when it is your fear keeping you back or intuition that is speaking out.
Such an excellent question and insight!
My reply back was:
I don’t always say yes to everything. One must still have their boundaries. But part of living daringly is assessing if those boundaries are still working for you.
To me, intuition and fear sound like different things. Through my personal journey of living daringly and daring greatly (per Brené Brown), I’ve learned the difference. But the only way you learn is by facing fear and pushing your boundaries. Then you find out which ones were really supposed to be there and which were a facade. I’ve found many of them to be facades…
Technically, I haven’t absolutely learned the difference. I still make mistakes, and I still doubt sometimes. But I have a better idea than I once did. And the latter portion of the statement is true: most of the boundaries I’ve confronted have been facades that served no purpose.
So I’ll keep testing my boundaries. I won’t say yes to everything! I’ll keep the boundaries that have served me well.
For the others, well, I’ll take the life full of pleasures. I won’t let fear become debilitating and keep me from living a healthy, lovely life.
And I wish the same for you!
I like the way you put it. The key for me is testing my bounderies not someone else’s. Maybe for me, getting up in front of an audience and telling a story is as life changing as jumping out of an airplane. Why should it matter to you as long as it matters to me. That is probably the most important lesson grey hair has handed me. Don’t vegetate but don’t feel as though you’re missing something because you’d rather walk a trail in your local park than take a buffet encased cruise. I test my bounderies like I would make a pizza dough. I just keep pushing out the edges little by little. They curl back up, I push them out a little more until I have a nice well rounded crust. What makes it delicious is what you put on it, not how big you make it.
Good point about falling into those mental boundaries that other people set for us! Everything is different for everyone, and different things are challenging for everyone. That’s one of the reasons I think it is so important for us to share our whole stories with people. Then we start to see that people we think are fearless really aren’t. They face their fears all of the time. But their fears look different than what we might expect…
Thanks for the comment! 🙂
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