These are the riders of a mental and emotional Apocalypse, the unavoidable plaguing pathogens of you that cannot be avoided if you’re trying to do something. Well, they can be avoided but you’d have to be a sociopath with delusions of grandeur to never feel them.

Doubt is useful, it means you’re being smart about it because you’re not blindly and idly strolling along the path unaware of the wolves and pitfalls and that will allow you to survive – if and only if you don’t let it take over to the point where you don’t trust your decisions any more. Hesitation is doubt’s ugly brother on the action level. You know what you should be doing and how it should be done but you start questioning it and you get paralyzed into not moving by the “what if” scenarios, hesitate and miss the chance to act. Shut the inner critic up and do it even though you have doubts. There are no guarantees… in anything. But there is the dignity of fighting for it and trying.

Those who say fear isn’t real at all have gone quite mad with positive thinking and positive thinking alone solves nothing. No it is not real just as much as love isn’t. It’s YOUR feeling and to you it is very real, be it justifiable or not. Your body really does go into an altered state where cortisol rises, your heart rate goes up, you might feel it in your gut as butterflies or knots in your stomach. This physical profile of fear is the same as that of excitement. Your body and brain are hyper alert and the only difference between the two is what you call it. Fear stops you only if you let your brain call it fear. Most of the times within the comfortable life we live now fear is a shadow of a rudimentary survival mechanism that hasn’t adapted to new circumstances. You won’t die if you speak up at a meeting or say I love you even if it is not reciprocated.

Doubt, hesitation and fear in the need lead to silence and staying silent on the things that matter to you is a sure way to wake up one morning and wonder how you got to where you are. Of course you did, you never said where you wanted to go in the first place and let yourself be led and drafted for other people’s agendas. Most of the problems you have now can be traced to those four things. Yes they are all real but so is heart, courage, action and tenacity.