All of us have dreams. Things we want to accomplish. Goals we would love to achieve. Successes we want to reach out and claim.
In my role as CEO of a marketing and management firm–one that helps people achieve their business goals (and often woven into this, their personal ambitions), I have a front row seat to the dreams daily. I watch them flower and, all too often, I see them wilt.
What causes the latter? Of course, many factors come into play, but none more important, more destructive, than FEAR.
What if it doesn’t work?
What if I lose money?
What if I fail?
What if people think less of me?
These are the walls, the obstacles, the bogeyman, real and imaginary, that stop dreams in their tracks somewhere along the continuum from conception to, ideally, realization.
I have seen it myself in my own entrepreneurial career. At the crossroads that inevitably appear, I have had to face the FEARS. They do serve a valuable role, acting as checks on impulsive behavior and forcing us to examine our actions so that we can do so with the highest level of knowledge and prudence.
But at the end of that rather antiseptic exercise, we are alone again. Naked. With no real answers that can light a torch to the guaranteed route. The sure fire decisions.
It all comes down, at some point in the discovery, to whether we cave to fear or act on the courage it always takes to move mountains. To build companies and careers, to take products to market, to drive ourselves BEYOND our skill sets, to fall face down in the mud, to empty the bank account and to summon our resolve and act not without fear, anyone can do that, but in the face of fear.
Once you have stress-tested your idea to the max, once you have confirmed to yourself that the goal you are pursuing is truly the one you MUST accomplish, you/we must cross the line in the sand where fear and courage meet and be willing to move into the great unknown.
It is where we meet ourselves. It is where we define ourselves. And it is where our ultimate fate resides.
Mark Stevens
CEO
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