Written by Kristin Barton Cuthriell, LCSW

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

(This is chapter four in my book, The Snowball Effect: How to Build Positive Momentum in Your Life. For a limited time, get a free digital copy HERE!)

 

Moving Past Mediocrity

 

If your car had a dead battery and it was petrified of jumper cables, it would have two choices. It could embrace the fear and allow the cables to give it a jump, or it could refuse the jump and remain a motionless car. If it chooses to face its fears, it will move forward. If it chooses to avoid the jumper cables, it will go nowhere at all. You are not so different from your car. You will have to face some fears if you want to move forward in life.

Without the courage to face our fears, we stay stuck in a life of mediocrity. We must be willing to step outside our comfort zone if we want to experience life at its best. By settling for the status quo, we sell ourselves short. There is so much more to life than that. There is so much more to us than that. We need to do more than avoid the destructive boulder. Life is too good and too short to just settle for the status quo. Saying to ourselves, “Well, I am not self-destructing, so I guess I am doing all right,” just doesn’t cut it. Oh, no. We must keep going so we can experience the excellence that resides within us.

Moving past mediocrity and beyond the status quo involves change, and change is hard. Even healthy change that will improve our lives in magnificent ways is tough. Change is so difficult because we fear the unknown. We like things to be predictable. Many years ago, our fear of the unknown served our ancestors well. Being cautious and playing it safe probably kept them from getting eaten by some hungry animal. Knowing what might happen in their environment and acting accordingly helped them survive. But in today’s world it often holds us back from experiencing all life has to offer. We miss out on exciting opportunities or stay in miserable situations because we do not want to stray from our comfort zone. Our brain is hard-wired to keep us safe, but in today’s world we often fear the invisible wild animal. It is our fear that often holds us hostage, preventing us from making changes in our lives—changes that will get us to where we really want to go.

We actually fear things that may help us. We fear leaving a dead-end job because we do not know what a new job might bring. We are scared to leave a destructive relationship because life without it will be unpredictable. We fear opening ourselves up to another person because our disclosure may be met with rejection. We prefer to play it safe. However, this perceived safety comes at a huge price. The price is living a life of mediocrity, which is a life not fully lived. By playing it safe, we may miss out on a more fulfilling job or we may stay in a relationship that puts us in harm’s way. Because of our fear, we may never get to experience an authentic connection with another person that only true intimacy can bring. Yes, we may be running from the imaginary wild animal and avoiding the very things that can improve our lives all in the name of safety.

(This is chapter four in my book, The Snowball Effect: How to Build Positive Momentum in Your Life. For a limited time, get a free digital copy HERE!)

Willing to Risk

 

It takes a lot of courage to step outside of the familiar and embrace something new. Stepping outside of our comfort zone often upsets our equilibrium and makes us feel off balance. It makes us feel anxious and insecure. This is why people often choose to be mired in misery rather than make changes to improve their lives. But if we are willing to risk—if we are willing to put ourselves out there and become vulnerable—amazing doors will open. Seneca, a Roman philosopher, put it so well: “It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”

Now, I think it is important for me to clarify that by risk I do not mean to go out there and do something totally unwise just for the thrill of it. The other day, I was flipping the television channels and saw a man leap off a thirty-six-foot platform into a baby pool holding twelve inches of water. To me, this was life-threatening and unwise. Maybe I am missing something, and obtaining this world record jump-started his momentum, but I am thinking that there is not a lot of momentum in being dead. Although he did survive, I would not recommend building momentum this way.

Years ago I was working at a psychiatric hospital, and the CEO called a meeting to discuss his plan to begin an intensive outpatient program for substance abusers. During this think-tank kind of meeting, he asked all of us to brainstorm new ideas for this program and to get back to him if we had anything that we wanted to share. Now, I was fairly new to the hospital and had never had the opportunity to officially meet the CEO. I was newly licensed and working only part-time, but I had ideas for the program that I was convinced would help the patients. My ideas had to do with instilling hope in those who had become hopeless. I called my approach “hope-based therapy.” Not knowing if the CEO would give me the time of day, I anxiously e-mailed him about my hope-based therapy approach.

To my surprise, I received a reply e-mail almost immediately, and we scheduled a time to meet. I was anxious before I e-mailed him my presentation, and I was even more nervous before our face-to-face meeting. Although I believed in what I was presenting, I didn’t know what the CEO would think. Contacting him made me feel vulnerable, and I feared rejection. Before I walked into his office, I took a moment and pictured the worst-case scenario. A list of possible outcomes waved through my mind: I could get nervous, mess up my words, and make no sense at all. I could throw up. I could freeze and forget everything. He could reject my ideas. He could think that I’m stupid. All of these things ran through my mind. I decided that I could tolerate the worst and then walked into his office.

He sat in a chair with my hope-based therapy approach up on a big screen. We discussed it for a little while, and the next thing I knew he was asking me if I would be interested in running the entire program. He was excited! I couldn’t tell who was more passionate about my ideas, him or me. It didn’t matter. There was energy in the room, and I loved it. He loved it! I was just there to present my ideas, and he was asking me to run the program! Before I left, he told me that he really hoped that I would one day publish my approach to helping others. I had never thought about publishing before.

Driving home that evening, I reflected on our meeting and my apprehension about presenting my ideas. I had put myself out there and made myself vulnerable, and he had loved it. Today, I am grateful for that CEO. He believed in my work enough to encourage me to publish it. And do you know what? I did. It is the approach that you now hold in your hands. It is no longer called hope-based therapy, but its fundamental principles are the same. Over several years it morphed from my original hope-based therapy approach to “let life in practices,” and then I finally published it as The Snowball Effect.

If I had decided to stay in my comfort zone, I would have never approached the CEO. If I had given in to my anxiety, my ideas would have stayed in my head. I would not have started my original blog, Let Life In Practices, because I felt a certain amount of vulnerability each time I wrote a post and pushed the publish button. I would not have changed the Let Life In Practices blog to The Snowball Effect blog because of the anxiety I felt when making that change. No matter how large my passion, there was always this looming fear: Will they reject it? If I had allowed my fear to hold me back, I would have never published this book. Putting myself out there as an author is scary, and I am guaranteed to receive a certain amount of rejection. Whether the rejection comes from publishing houses or readers, even the best projects are not going to please everyone.

Earlier this year, I was reading a blog post by Dr. Wayne Jacobs that really resonated with me. In the post, Dr. Jacobs relates a story originally told by author and motivational speaker John Maxwell. The story is about John Maxwell attending his nephew’s Little League baseball game. Maxwell’s nephew had not gotten a hit that season, and the coach encouraged him to just stand there when he was up to bat and refrain from swinging. His coach assumed that he would strike out and was hoping for a walk. He wanted to play it safe. John was not really happy about this and began to shout, “Swing, son, swing!” So the boy swung and missed. And then he swung again and missed. It wasn’t until the third and final swing that he made contact with the ball. The ball didn’t travel far before the pitcher retrieved it. The pitcher then threw it right over the first baseman’s head, and Maxwell’s nephew ran the bases for a home run.

Dr. Jacobs asks us in his blog post, “Are you afraid to swing? To take chances in your job, your family, your faith?” He goes on to say, “It’s OK to miss sometimes. But don’t live life hoping for a walk. Great things only happen to those willing to risk.”¹

We can learn a great deal from this story. If we always play it safe, we never live up to our true potential. It is much better to swing and miss than to go through life never swinging at all. You see, the more you swing, the better the odds of making contact with the ball. I can promise you one thing—if you do not face your fear and swing, you will never get a hit. That much is guaranteed.

In Karen Salmansohn’s book How to be Happy, Dammit, she tells a fable called “Dope on a Rope.”² In this fable, the king gives the criminal a choice between two punishments. The criminal can choose to be hung by a rope or take the punishment behind a big scary steel door. In no time at all, the criminal decides on the rope. Out of curiosity, the criminal then asks the king what is behind that big scary door. The king laughs and says that freedom is behind the door, but most people are so afraid of the unknown that they take the rope.

Can you relate? Have you either stayed in miserable situations or settled for the status quo because you fear the unknown? Sometimes playing it safe is not so safe at all. In Spencer Johnson’s parable Who Moved My Cheese, two of the characters almost starve to death before they muster up the courage to make a change. Spencer Johnson reminds us, “If you do not change, you can become extinct.”³

In order to move forward in life, we need to be able to tolerate the temporary anxiety that accompanies change. The key word here is temporary. The positive changes that you make may last a lifetime, while the fear is short-lived. As a matter of fact, the fear of change is usually worse than the change itself. Whether you are trying to decide to end a relationship, change careers, relocate, or go back to school, the anxiety or fear usually decreases after you make your decision. Trying to make the decision to change is the worst part. Once you make the change, the fear usually dissolves. In other words, contemplating change is harder than the change itself.

(This is chapter four in my book, The Snowball Effect: How to Build Positive Momentum in Your Life. For a limited time, get a free digital copy HERE!)

 

Change Involves Loss

 

Another reason we so often avoid change and settle for the status quo is that change involves loss. No matter how badly you want to get out of a situation, it usually involves losing something. In order to move on to something new, you must give up something. Whether the thing you are leaving behind is something that you cherish or despise, it is familiar to you. It may be a familiar routine, a lifestyle, a relationship, a job, or even an addiction. When you give up something, you will most likely feel some degree of sadness. Even some of the most celebrated events in your life involve loss. Graduations, weddings, births, new jobs, and relocations, no matter how exciting, signify the end of an era. With all new beginnings, something is left behind, and we often fear leaving the familiar to walk out into uncharted territories.

While working with individuals in both inpatient and outpatient substance abuse facilities, I learned that people in recovery experience a great deal of loss when giving up their addiction. Even when they feel as if they have hit rock bottom and have lost everything in their life that is important to them, they grieve the substance that they are giving up. No matter how much they desperately want to change, they grieve the thing that they have come to rely on—their addiction.

 

Even people who are leaving abusive relationships usually experience profound feelings of loss. Victims of domestic violence will usually tell you that the relationship wasn’t all bad, and that there were things that they loved about their abuser. If you study domestic violence and the cycle of abuse, you will see that a honeymoon stage usually follows an abusive act. During this honeymoon stage, an abuser often apologizes for the abuse, promising never to do it again. It is at this time that the abuser is extremely loving and compassionate toward the victim. While the abuse itself sometimes motivates a victim to make a change, anxiety and feelings of loss will arise when a victim begins to contemplate leaving the relationship. These feelings will make it more likely that the victim will make no change at all.

 

Fear of Intimacy

 

Many times we hold ourselves back because we fear rejection and failure. We would rather not try at all than put ourselves out there and risk not succeeding. But what we don’t realize is that we have no chance to succeed if we refuse to face our fears and become vulnerable. This fear of vulnerability interferes with many different aspects of our lives, but it especially interferes with our ability to establish emotionally intimate relationships with others. We fear that if people really know us well, they will reject us. Because of this fear, we often put up walls, refusing to let others in. We open up only so much, if at all. The problem here is that the ability to be vulnerable is actually the key to having long-lasting emotionally intimate connections. People can tell when we are not being authentic. Intimate connections involve being real. People are drawn to our authentic self. True intimacy occurs when both parties are able to drop their social masks in order to be truly known. This involves risk, but a risk worth taking if you want to experience the best in life.

 

Embracing Change

 

Without change we can’t grow. If we allow our anxieties to hold us back, we pull ourselves down. We create our own friction and resistance, friction and resistance that block positive momentum and stop the snowball effect dead in its tracks. We cannot survive in any job or in any relationship if we are not willing to adapt to change. Think about it. Physicians need to know the most up-to-date medications and procedures. Teachers need to know the most current curriculum. Whether you work for a large corporation or you need to know how to turn on your new television, you will need to embrace change.

 

Relationships do not survive unless both people are able to endure change. Just this morning, I heard a woman telling another woman that her husband used to work as the guitar player in a rock band before he became the pastor at a local church. I feel pretty confident that going from playing in a rock band to pastoring a church involved change, not just on the part of the woman’s husband, but on her as well. Switching careers usually involves some degree of lifestyle change, which requires both individuals involved in a committed partnership to adapt if the relationship is to survive.

 

Some changes happen whether we like it or not. There simply is no choice, and sometimes this is a good thing. Think about all of the changes we go through during adolescence. Luckily we don’t have to decide whether or not we want to go through puberty and deal with the anxiety such a decision would bring. It just happens—and if it didn’t, we would never move into adulthood. But to get to adulthood, we had to endure the difficult transition of adolescence. We had to deal with pimples, mood swings, and peer pressure. We had to experience hormonal changes, awkward growth spurts, and squeaky voices, on top of other bodily changes and the push and pull for independence. But those changes were temporary, and as rough as it might have been, we made it through to adulthood. I sometimes wonder how many of us would still be children if the transition had been a choice.

 

When you consistently resist and avoid all change, you stop moving forward in life. You stay stuck right where you are. You do not reach your full potential, and neither do your relationships with others. Most of us have, at one time or another, made up excuses to avoid change. These would include all types of procrastination techniques to put off exercising, eating healthy, cleaning, studying, job seeking, or making doctor’s appointments.

 

Years ago a friend of mine, a very educated and skilled professional, disclosed to me his plans to find another job. After being with his company for several years, he felt that he had grown as much as he could with the current company and needed to branch out and look for opportunities that would promote his personal and professional growth. His current position did not allow him to fully utilize his professional skills and education.

 

As he sent out his resume and went on numerous interviews, many opportunities presented themselves to him. He was being recruited by several wonderful companies that would have provided him with the growth and compensation he was looking for. But instead of taking the leap, he continually sabotaged himself, making excuses as to why the opportunities might not work for him. I knew that he was unhappy in his current job, but he chose to stay there rather than put up with the temporary anxiety that would come with a job change. He allowed his fear to hold him back from some pretty amazing opportunities. This kept him stuck in a motionless status quo.

(This is chapter four in my book, The Snowball Effect: How to Build Positive Momentum in Your Life. For a limited time, get a free digital copy HERE!)

 

Take a moment to answer the following questions:

 

• What areas of my life are making me unhappy?
• Do I make excuses and come up with reasons to stay right where I am?
• Would making a change create anxiety or a sense of loss for me?
• If I were to make a change, would the grief and uneasiness that I experience be temporary?
• What might I gain by making a change?
• What do I have to lose by making a change?
• What do I have to lose if I stay with the status quo?
• If I make a change, what is the worst-case scenario? Can I survive it?

 

Life is just too short to spend it in fear. Having the courage to face those fears can take you to places you never thought possible. Remember that anything new becomes comfortable and routine if it is done long enough. Identify the things that are going well in your life. These are the things that you probably don’t want to change. But also identify areas of needed growth. Making changes here will propel you to a much higher altitude. Making changes here may be necessary if you are to experience the best version of you. Sometimes it is only he who attempts the ridiculous that ever achieves the impossible.

 

Sometimes we need to take risks in order to grow. How are we to create a positive snowball effect if we consistently refuse to move? Positive momentum is created by motion. Norman Vincent Peale tells us, “Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.”⁴ Remember that. Life rewards action. Face the fear that holds you back from the things that you really want in life. Eleanor Roosevelt put it so well: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.” And do you know what? The very thing that you fear many times ends up to be no horror at all.

 

How to Let Go of Fear

 

• Acknowledge and own your fear. Admit it.
• Try to figure out where it originated. This will help put things into perspective for you. Maybe your fear is rational and you really are in immediate danger, or your fear may belong in the past yet your body still very much reacts to it today.
• Identify what triggers your fear.
• Ask yourself, “How does this fear affect me?”
• Challenge your fears. Is whatever you fear really that dangerous? Are you running from an imaginary animal? If you determine that your fears are warranted, ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that can happen to me?” If you can tolerate the worst-case scenario, by all means proceed.
• Just do it! You will gain confidence in yourself once you do that which you fear. The new will eventually become routine.
• Take baby steps. This will gradually desensitize you to its power. I once worked with a man who suffered from an anxiety disorder and was overcome with panic at just the thought of leaving his home. I had him go as far as the porch for seven days straight. Then I had him go to the driveway for several days. Eventually he was able to drive to the grocery store, but he did not go in. A month later he went inside the store. What started as a small victory—going to the porch—turned into so much more. He overcame his fear.
• Fight fear with faith. Never underestimate the power of prayer.
• Continue to build momentum by persevering through the setbacks.
• Celebrate breakthrough moments. Celebrate your progress.

 

Final Words

 

Change is hard! We fear the unknown. We want to stay within our comfort zone. But if we always play it safe and avoid taking risks, we do not fully live our lives. A life of mediocrity is not the best. Refuse to live this way! In order to build positive momentum in our lives, we must face our fears. We must fight our fears with faith. We must be able to embrace the loss that accompanies change. As we learned from Karen Salmansohn’s fable “Dope with a Rope,” don’t choose the rope; choose the door to freedom. Inaction creates doubt and fear. If you want to move past your fear, do not sit on the couch and think about it. Go out and get active. Get busy creating the life you want, one baby step at a time.

 

This is chapter four in my book, The Snowball Effect: How to Build Positive Momentum in Your Life. For a limited time, get a free digital copy HERE!)

 

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