What will you regret?
Did you know the average life span of a New Zealander is 80 years 73 days? In that time your heart will beat 3,000,000,000 times!
I don’t wish to be morbid but when you are lying on your deathbed and your heart is beating its 3 billionth beat, what questions will you be asking yourself?
I expect I’ll be asking: Did I have fun; did I do everything on my bucket list? Did I achieve all I wanted to achieve? I don’t think I’ll regret all the stupid things that I did that I shouldn’t have done. You know – that drunken episode, that bad relationship, that stupid career move. Mistakes are all part of life’s rich tapestry.
However I do think I’ll regret the times when I didn’t make the most of my opportunities: When I lost courage and failed to ask that girl out on a date. When I declined to make that speech because I was scared of public speaking. When I could have made that phone call, but I chickened out because of my fear of rejection.
It’s our fears that hold us back and stop us doing the things we know we should do. It’s our fears that restrict and limit us. FEAR is the thing that is standing between us and our goal and on our deathbed we will regret the times when we gave into those fears.
Some people try and tell me that they don’t have fear. There is only one type of human being who has no fear – psychopaths! All the rest of us are scared of something – spiders, sharks, dentists, public speaking. Even the most experienced and successful people amongst us have fear in their lives. As we grow our fears don’t disappear they just change; we become scared of different things.
Nelson Mandela said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” I believe that that is what life is about, conquering our fears. Being brave and doing the stuff we are scared of. The question is where do our fears come from?
We aren’t born with too many fears, we learn most of them. Until recently I had a fear of sharks. Where did I learn that fear from? From the film Jaws! I learnt my fear after watching a plastic shark at the cinema! In truth it’s not the plastic shark that I was scared of, it’s the ideas that my mind created after it watched the film. It created scenarios of me being attacked by sharks and placed the scenarios in front of me! All our fears are mind created. The ME that’s inside knows that a shark has much more to be scared of than I do. People have killed infinitely more sharks than sharks have killed people and the ME inside knows that. Unfortunately I don’t take much notice of the ME inside and I listen to my mind instead.
Does your mind play tricks on you too? Do you have a little voice in your head that tells you what to be scared of? Some of you have just said to yourself: What little voice? – YES THAT’S THE ONE!
That little voice isn’t you. It’s your mind! Unfortunately most people think it’s them and so they pay a lot of attention to it, they believe what it says and they do what it tells them to do. Try looking at things a different way: Inside you have the thinker and the knower. We THINK the shark is dangerous but deep inside we KNOW it’s not. The thinker is your MIND and the knower is YOU. You are not your mind. You HAVE a mind, a tool that you can use to help you.
Unfortunately for most people their mind has taken them over and is using them.
Your mind is putting information in front of you in order to help or protect you but it invents much of this information! Most of us identify with our mind, we think it’s US and we believe what it tells us.
So what would happen if you could stop believing what your mind told you? That’s a bit difficult for those totally identify with their mind. If you think your mind is YOU then of course you’ll believe everything it tells you but once you realise and accept that your mind isn’t you, it’s easy to stop believing everything it says. So the first step is to dis-identify with our mind is to realise that it is just a tool – very powerful and sophisticated but just a tool. It’s not necessarily ‘right’ or ‘constructive’ and most importantly it’s not us.
Sports psychology taught me that if you improve your thoughts, you will improve your actions, which in turn, will improve your results. To a certain extent this is true but for me there was always a missing part to the equation. I found that I wasn’t always able to control my thinking; sometimes my mind would play tricks on me and lead me in the wrong direction. Usually I would interpret that as a weakness in myself and would strive to be even more controlling of my thoughts next time.
Now after looking at things from this new perspective I can see that I don’t have a weakness, my mind does! All I need to do is observe and watch my mind and stop trying to control it. If I see my mind as a tool that I can use, then I don’t need to react to it. I can observe the thoughts, not judge, criticise, accept, agree or disagree with them, just observe. If I understand that ‘I am not my mind’, I can choose a course of action without assuming that the information my mind is giving me is ‘the truth’.
When faced with the thing we fear: failure, rejection etc. our mind will create negative thoughts and usually, we’ll identify with those thoughts, believing them to be true. This causes most of us to run away from the activity. By observing those thoughts and staying detached from them it becomes easier to do the thing we are scared of.
So for the next few days try this exercise: Observe your thoughts, listen to that voice in your head. Don’t judge, criticise, accept, agree or disagree, just listen and observe. Realise that the voice or the thoughts aren’t you; they’re coming from your mind. When you observe the thoughts without judgment, any fear you may be feeling just melts away. Once the fear has gone away you can get on with the actions you need to take and make the most of your 3 billion heartbeats!