Hey everyone!
Welcome back to Lavendaire.
It's Aileen.
I'm so excited to have you back for our Dream Life Series.
This is the fourth video in the series.
So we already covered: Master Your Mindset, Rediscover Yourself, Clarify What You Want,
and now we are on Release What's Holding You Back, and I think this is a really big one.
By the way: If you're just dropping in and you haven't been part of our series,
you can find out more and click the link below to join.
But releasing what holding you back is all about acknowledging the fears that you have,
all those fears and those things that are keeping you from actually taking action and
living your dream life.
There's actually more that's holding you back than you might realize,
so today we're gonna try to analyze, break it all down.
So let's just go over some common fears about
what would hold you back from living your dream life.
Number 1: Fear of failure.
A lot of us are scared to start our dream because we are afraid to fail,
and I think society paints this picture that you have to be happy and successful,
especially with social media, that we're not giving ourselves that space to fail,
when in reality the most successful people have failed hundreds and hundreds of time in their life.
And I don't know if I'm exaggerating there, but you do have to fail in order to succeed.
Failure is just a stepping stone to where you're meant to go.
Take failure as a learning experience.
It's not a negative experience.
It's just a learning experience, a life experience
that you're going to have to go through if you want to succeed and get what you want.
The second common fear is being afraid of what others think of you.
So it's that fear of judgment from others,
whether it's your close friends and family or from your peers or society in general.
It's just being afraid of what others think and putting too much weight
on what others think and others' opinions about you.
So a big part of learning to carve your own path in life is you have to let go.
Let go of caring what other people think.
If you put so much weight on other people's opinions,
you're really going to be pulled in all directions
and you're never gonna listen to your true self
You might even just be afraid of uncertainty or afraid of change.
People generally like to stay the same.
They like to stay comfortable and they don't like to stretch too far outside of that comfort zone,
so any change or risks will just scare them.
And that's a totally natural fear to have.
Another common form of fear is something that the author Steven Pressfield calls "resistance",
and that just means that invisible force
that keeps you from taking action and doing your work
because your work that you want to do is just so important,
and because it's important, it's so scary that you don't start on it.
A common expression of resistance is procrastination.
And I'm sure all of us can understand and relate to procrastination.
And that is a form of fear as well.
It's fear of starting your work, fear of actually doing it,
because – I don't know – it's just so big and important that you,
for some reason, don't start it until the last minute, until you have to.
And in some cases, when you're thinking of making a big change towards your dream life,
if it's not on a deadline, some people will wait forever
and they will procrastinate until it's too late and they didn't get to change their life.
Another one that I want to mention is fear of success.
And that might sound weird to you.
You might be like, "Uh, I don't think anyone's afraid of success."
Well that fear might be a subconscious fear
because some people are afraid that, if they succeed, then everything will change.
It will change them, it will change their life, it will change the people around them.
They're afraid the people around them won't like them once they become successful.
So they kind of hinder themselves and kind of stay and settle
in the same place as their friends and peers and stuff.
I think fears in success is something that most people won't admit to having or won't
even realize that they have.
But it's just a subconscious thought and a subconscious limiting belief that's in the backburner of your mind.
I also want to mention that, in order to understand fear and how to overcome it,
you have to remember where fear comes from and the purpose of fear.
So fear does serve a purpose.
If you go back to our primitive times, fear in our minds was created to protect us from danger,
protect us from being killed, being eaten, falling down a cliff.
All of those are pretty rational fears, fears of the unknown
because anything unknown can potentially kill us.
But now in modern day society, we are generally safe
and there are no life-threatening dangers happening to us every day.
Your body can't really tell the difference between first world safe fears vs. real life-threatening danger fears,
so it's all sending the same kind of signal throughout your body
that keeps you from taking action, that kind of , you know?
So although fear does serve a purpose protecting us from danger, protecting us from the unknown,
you are smart enough to realize whether this fear is safe enough to do.
Even though it is risky, it's still something that, after you do it, you're gonna be alive.
You're gonna be breathing.
And you will survive it no matter what, which is totally okay.
Alright, so now I wanted to share some lessons on fear to keep in mind.
#1 is to remember: Growth happens outside of your comfort zone.
So as much as it's easy to stay where you are right now, stay comfortable,
it will only benefit you to step outside of that comfort zone,
because even though it's uncomfortable – it's scary, you might get hurt, you might make mistakes –
that's still how you're gonna grow and how you're gonna learn.
And I think life is better outside of your comfort zone.
What you can do is: As you slowly step out of this comfort zone,
then eventually your comfort zone grows larger and then you stretch that
and it becomes larger and larger and larger,
so that in the future you will be stronger and more invincible as a person.
And like a muscle, if you stop working out for a while, it will get weaker
and then you will have to start from where you were before
to work up that strength again and face your fears.
Another thing to realize is that fear can serve as your compass.
Your fears are actually showing you where you should go.
You might have heard the saying "Follow your fear."
It's because fears are basically what's the most important to you,
and whatever scares you the most is actually the thing
that will change your life the most if you actually do it.
And I'm talking about those first world kind of fears.
I'm not talking about life-or-death threatening situation-type of fears,
so I hope you're smart enough to be able to tell the difference.
The last lesson on fear is that fear never goes away.
No matter how successful you are, whether you think someone has it all,
fear is still present in everyone's lives and that's just a normal part of being human, is to feel fear.
And if you don't feel fear, you're a psychopath, right?
So basically, you have to learn to live with fear and take the action anyway.
It's basically acknowledging that fear will be with you in your life,
but not letting your fear control you.
Rather, you are managing your fear, acknowledging that,
"Yes, I see you.
I see what you're saying, but I'm still gonna do what I want to do."
Next, I want to touch on a couple other things that might be holding you back
from taking action or living your dream life.
The first one is having preconceived notions or limiting beliefs about yourself and your abilities.
We kind of touched on this in the first episode, Master Your Mindset,
but I want to note it again because your beliefs can really hold you back.
If you have some beliefs that are not allowing you to believe that you can live that dream life,
that you can achieve what you want, then you're never even gonna take that first step.
So really really check with yourself and ask yourself:
"Do I have any beliefs about myself that hold me back?"
It's not always on the surface.
You're gonna have to dig deep a little more, but just letting you know.
The second other thing that might be holding you back is perfectionism.
A lot of people fall under this category, a lot of type A's out there,
is that you're so perfectionist that you either don't wanna start
or you don't finish whatever project that you're working on because you want it to be too perfect.
Perfectionism just slows things down so much.
It's one of those barriers to really getting what you want.
You have to learn to let that go, let that perfectionism go,
realize that done is better than perfect.
This is a lesson that I personally have to continue learning in my life,
so just gotta say it today.
Alright, now that we're done going over common things
that might be holding you back from living your dream life,
it's time to get to the homework portion.
So in your emails, you'll find a worksheet.
This is a fear-setting worksheet that's inspired by Tim Ferriss.
That worksheet will help you list and analyze your fears,
so you can learn to manage them, rather than let them take over.
And you'll feel so much better after doing this exercise,
because it helps you see that these fears, although they might have some weight,
at the end of the day you'll be okay no matter what.
It's really about learning to let go of that burden that these fears have on you.
And then there will be some journal prompts that will help you uncover
what else could be holding you back and release all of that as well.
So the goal of today is to really face our fears, really look at what's holding you back,
what could potentially be holding you back and learn to just ,
filter through and let it go so that you can start taking action and living your dream life.
So the next video that you'll see on Friday will be on taking action and that one's a fun one as well.
So I will see you guys in the next one.
By the way: If you're not signed up for the series and you want the worksheets, click below.
There will be more info down below on how to catch up with the series as well.
And now I'll share some of my favorite posts from you guys on the Dream Life Series.