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experiencelifemag.com
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More Skills and Characteristics
Courage and Risk-Taking
As Mark Twain famously said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.” Important words to heed when it comes to facing up to our resolutions, many of which might require us to first face up to our innermost anxieties. Perhaps we’ve resolved to reach out to people and make new friends, or maybe we’ve decided that we really are going to take that improv class this year. Whatever the case, says life coach Lori Radun, we need to master the skill of processing our fear in order to control it.
“Talk about your fears — what are you most afraid is going to happen if you, for example, try to make a new friend? And if your worst nightmare actually happens, then what are you going to do?” Radun says. “It’s about walking yourself through the fear and seeing that you really could survive and not fall apart if the worst thing happened — and most of the time the worst thing isn’t going to happen anyway.”
Echoing Twain, Radun points out, “Having courage doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear, having courage means you push through the fear.”
To work up the courage to achieve any resolution, life coach and author Cheryl Richardson suggests starting small by wearing a bold color or taking the lead on a project at work or driving a different way home — anything, she says, that falls outside your comfort zone.
Patience
Just about everybody could benefit from learning a little patience when it comes to resolutions, says Richardson, because there is so much impatience surrounding when goals are going to be met. The key is not to expect overnight success, she says, and learning to take pleasure in the journey toward your goal and worrying less about the goal itself. Training yourself to be patience and to persevere is really important, she adds, because by just stopping and taking a deep breath, you stop engaging the body’s fight-or-flight system.
“You actually begin to train your physiology to slow down, which is really important when it comes to learning patience,” Richardson explains. “When you’re anxious about something unimportant, your body is giving you erroneous information that there is danger, when really it may just be getting your buttons pushed. So developing patience teaches you how to process and breathe through that period.”
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More Skills and Characteristics
| Web Extra
January-February 2007 |
Courage and Risk-Taking
As Mark Twain famously said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.” Important words to heed when it comes to facing up to our resolutions, many of which might require us to first face up to our innermost anxieties. Perhaps we’ve resolved to reach out to people and make new friends, or maybe we’ve decided that we really are going to take that improv class this year. Whatever the case, says life coach Lori Radun, we need to master the skill of processing our fear in order to control it.
“Talk about your fears — what are you most afraid is going to happen if you, for example, try to make a new friend? And if your worst nightmare actually happens, then what are you going to do?” Radun says. “It’s about walking yourself through the fear and seeing that you really could survive and not fall apart if the worst thing happened — and most of the time the worst thing isn’t going to happen anyway.”
Echoing Twain, Radun points out, “Having courage doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear, having courage means you push through the fear.”
To work up the courage to achieve any resolution, life coach and author Cheryl Richardson suggests starting small by wearing a bold color or taking the lead on a project at work or driving a different way home — anything, she says, that falls outside your comfort zone.
Patience
Just about everybody could benefit from learning a little patience when it comes to resolutions, says Richardson, because there is so much impatience surrounding when goals are going to be met. The key is not to expect overnight success, she says, and learning to take pleasure in the journey toward your goal and worrying less about the goal itself. Training yourself to be patience and to persevere is really important, she adds, because by just stopping and taking a deep breath, you stop engaging the body’s fight-or-flight system.
“You actually begin to train your physiology to slow down, which is really important when it comes to learning patience,” Richardson explains. “When you’re anxious about something unimportant, your body is giving you erroneous information that there is danger, when really it may just be getting your buttons pushed. So developing patience teaches you how to process and breathe through that period.”
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