FEAR AND TREMBLING

“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt  

Fear and Trembling was a book written by Soren Kierkegaard under the pen name Johannes de Silentio addressing the story of Abraham and his son, Isaac in the Old Testament. Talk about doing the things you cannot do! Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his son in order to prove his faith, his commitment to God. In our routine daily lives we are rarely challenged to do anything that approaches this level of difficulty. And yet, the weight of the choices we’re sometimes faced with seems more than we can bear. The difficulty, the dread, comes from the thought that we cannot do something. The liberation is in finding out we can do more than we thought.

So here’s the challenge. You must do the thing you think you cannot do… before the thought of doing it and your imagined negative outcome render you unwilling to even try. An example of how this plays out might be this: you’d like to renegotiate the terms of your employment because you want to pursue your dream of going to law school. More flexible hours, maybe even the ability to work from home, will tremendously simplify your life and make it possible for you to have an income at a job you’ve liked while pursuing your dream. This is unchartered territory at your company. You imagine that your request will be denied, much less discussed. And yet you hope that it might just go your way. It’s in this space between the unknowns that the dread grows; the weight begins to bear down.

Just do it! Do the thing you think you cannot do. If it goes your way or not, you will then know where you stand and make a decision accordingly. But in taking the action you most feared to take, you’ve released the incredible amount of energy expended in putting it off because you were so unsure of the outcome. Ask yourself each day, “What is the one thing I least want to do today?” That’s the first thing you should do. Then do it. You’ll be surprised how much lighter you feel for the rest of the day.