Dare to play at the edges of your comfort zone
Image: Sally Anne Carroll
Just the other day, a client said to me, "I can't believe I dare to say that out loud." She wasn’t sharing a deep, dark secret. She was simply daring to tell the truth about what she wants more of in her life. At home. At work. From, and for, herself.
Now, she is daring to own it. And to do something about it.
It sounds so simple, but in practice, it’s often one of those things that is “simple but not easy.” Or at least we make it that way a lot of the time.It's confronting, this truth and dare stuff. It's also how we do anything that matters.
Do you dare to say what’s true for you?
For many of us, we do... and we don’t. It depends on which truth we’re talking about. But what separates the yes from the no? When you’re not being honest about where you are at in our mind, emotions or results, what’s holding you back? Where are you hiding from what you want to create in your life?
You cannot create what you do not acknowledge. But while telling the truth (or finding it) might be the starting point, the dares just keep on coming. Once we know what’s true for us and we are honest about what we want, it’s hard to go back to the place where we didn’t know. And so, we start to go forward. I see a lot of people do this: charge deep into the action. They need a goal and a plan — or twenty. They think they need to be fearless, to crush it, to have it all figured out. To go from zero to 60 in a day. This is a lie. And it’s a lie that keeps us both stuck and anxious. Who needs that?
Do you dare to just take the next step? And the one after that?
We think of daring as taking great risks. Yet more often, it’s a serious of small courages, right at the edges of where we are now, that make the big leaps, the plans and the goals possible. Do you dare to follow your inspiration and intuition as to what’s next? Do you dare to try and to stretch? To and learn and grow along the way? Do you dare to believe that by taking it one step at a time, by practicing in action, you can not only get where you’re going, but you can create something as yet unimagined?
I know that to be true. You can. People do it every day. Telling the truth seems more and more a radical act. Acting on it, even more so. I dare you, though, to do it as much as you can. I dare you to begin and to persist. It only takes one awareness, one decision, one inspired action, one tiny little act of courage to get the ball rolling... Where will you begin?
A challenge to you
Choose one area of your life this month to dare — not greatly — but in a small, sustainable, achievable way. To play at your edge. Every day, tell one truth about where you are and what you want to create. And every day, do one thing related to turning that vision into reality. I’d love to hear your results!
