Where is your YES?
Jack Canfield teaches that you can find everything you want on the other side of fear. I still remember the first time I read those words. Initially, it seemed like a fairly extreme statement to me, but after living a bit longer and becoming more self-aware, I came to agree with him.
Fear is something that we often don’t recognize. I certainly didn’t. It can camouflage itself in ways that make it unrecognizable for what it is. That’s how fear was keeping me from my most important YES moments. Without even being aware of it, I started to see them as one and the same automatically. To say YES triggered fear. After all, what if the answer was NO? The result of my fear was that my YES was almost always just out of reach.
The beauty of that realization was an understanding that I could use that to fight it. All I had to do to find (and claim) my YES was to find my fear. My YES was on the other side of my fear. That’s the real meaning of what Jack was teaching. My YES is everything I want and lives just beyond my fear.
But understanding and changing are not the same thing. To bring about change, we must always begin with the same thing: A decision to act. It’s the only way to battle fear because that’s another part of the essence of fear. It requires a new (changed) action. We have to decide that our YES outranks our fear and act.
We defang fear when we decide that we truly want something. In fact, it doesn’t stand a chance. That’s because we transform fear into fuel.
One of the skills you learn when you are learning the basic principles of coaching is something we call reframing. It’s about taking something and changing its context to change your perspective. Framing is the perfect word for that.
Imagine a piece of art, even a masterpiece, just rolled up and sitting on a table. You can’t realize or appreciate its worth. You could get some pins, unroll it, and just stick it up on a wall, but it’s still not going to do the job. To see it in its finest light, you must take the time to frame it. When we do that well, we can deeply appreciate its beauty and wonder.
A missing or wrong frame diminishes the art, even masks it. The right frame showcases it.
Fear simply creates the wrong frame for what we want. Claiming our desire creates the right one. It transforms what we see and how it impacts us.
Where are you afraid of saying yes? Not sure? Start by finding your fear. Then get moving to the other side of it and you will find your YES.
What you want most is waiting.
