Playing to Lose

I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about fear lately…and I think I’d like to share a story with you all.  Many people actually aren’t aware of this, but I spent a good portion of my life struggling with a paralyzing fear of social interaction.  In school, I wasn’t able to look people in the eye when I talked to them, and I mumbled at a level slightly below the range of human hearing.  As a result, I felt like I had earned a reputation as one of the “weird kids,” because all of my conversations looked like I wasn’t talking to anyone…and just sort of whispering to the floor all the time.  As funny as it seems in retrospect, it was really a terrible time for me.  I only had a few real friends…no chance with girls at all…and I eventually had to undergo a couple of IQ tests because some of my teachers were convinced that I might have been a bit “special.”  It turns out that I placed fairly high above normal…borderline genius, in fact…but because of  my fear, many people thought that I should have been in a special needs class.

I played sick on days when I was supposed to give a speech or a presentation, and instead of opting to do a make-up performance, I took the zero instead.  Giving speeches and making presentations caused my hands to shake so badly that I could almost never finish, anyway, so I figured there was no point.

That is what our fears have the potential to do to us.  They’re insidious monsters that roam around the shadows of our mind, forcing us to run from them and create safety zones in our minds…setting up barricades and roadblocks to keep them from getting in.  But guess what?  When we do that, we also keep ourselves from getting out.  I was trapped in my head for almost ten years, spending so much of my life hating myself and hating my fear for what it did to me.

But when I graduated from high school, and I really had the time to stop and look into the face of the fear monster, I decided to stop running from it…and start studying it.  And I happened up a realization that I wish I had stumbled on far earlier in my life.  Fear is not really a monster at all.  It is the test that life has given you…to see if you are worthy of the things that you want most.

In truth, fear is nothing more than a cardboard dragon that guards a treasure trove of untold riches.  Your greatest desires are in that trove.  Your greatest hopes.  Your greatest dreams.  All you have to do to get it…is walk past the beast.  And the funny thing is, the dragon won’t even put up a fight.  Because it’s NOT REAL.

But so many of us never gather up the courage to figure that out, do we?  I know I didn’t.  We see the things that we want in the distance…and we see this great, monstrous thing guarding them.  But most of us don’t have the balls(or the…ovaries? I guess?) to think about facing it, let alone touch it to see if it’s real or not.  We just see a terrifying vision, and we turn tail.  But when we run from our fears…how many of us realize that we are also running from our dreams?

In all the years I spent fearing social interaction, one of my biggest dreams was one that almost every awkward teen has: to find someone to fall in love with.  But unless you’re Edward Scissorhands, it’s incredibly difficult to get anyone to fall in love with you without social interaction.  I kept shunning social situations…and I kept missing out.  Much later in life, I learned that I’d missed out on quite a few opportunities for love because I was busy feeling sorry for myself.  I had kept my head down in fear and shame, and I had failed to see some of the things that were right in front of me.

So take hold of your life.  Walk past that dragon.  And the next one.  And the next one.  I guarantee you that each fear and each cardboard dragon that you conquer will yield a new achievement for you…a new dream reached…a new goal achieved…and if, for some reason, you don’t reach your dreams, at least you’ve got a sweet new collection of cardboard dragons…:D.  So why stay idle?  Why play it safe?  Why spend the rest of your life running from a monster that doesn’t really exist?  We can’t let our fear keep us from taking chances.  No matter how great the fear, we need to give it a shot.  Because life truly is shorter than we think…and as the great Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Thank you for taking the time to read and grow with me, friends.  May each new day bring you a new dragon conquered, a new mountain climbed, and a new outlook forged.  Namaste.

This particular post was inspired by a friend of mine who mentioned my blog in passing, saying, “Wow, you’re really turning into a regular self-help guru, aren’t you?”  And while I’m sure this was said with the best of intentions, it got me a little down.

You see, I’ve never really liked the sound of the “self-help” title.  I may have mentioned this in previous articles, but I’ve spent far too much of my time as a young man wandering through the self-help aisles of Guam’s local bookstores.  And all that time spent amidst those aisles has taught me almost nothing, save for the fact that if you want self-help…you need to start helping yourself.

Even the term “self-help” holds a strange contradiction in its nature.  By its name, it implies that we all have the capacity somewhere within ourselves to solve our own problems.  Yet we have to buy these books and listen to other people tell us how to do that.  I would go so far as to say that these books often hinder our ability to help ourselves, because they cause us to hand over all responsibility for our behavior to them.  If we don’t succeed, it’s not our fault.  Because we are supposedly no longer the ones responsible.  Some of us can become so dependent on these “self-help” books that we actually stop practicing the skills that we really need to overcome our problems, like self-control and willpower.  And without honing these skills, they weaken over time, leaving us susceptible to even more problems.

In this sense, the self-help industry isn’t really all that different from a religion.  Millions of people subscribing to the Self-Help Scriptures, giving up responsibility for their own actions and placing all their trust in a higher power that may or may not answer their prayers.  Being a Catholic that spent several years studying Zen Buddhism, I’ve always found it interesting that one of the key tenets of the Buddhist belief system is to detach ourselves from earthly bonds.  All answers come from within, not from some external source.  Not even the God that you choose to worship.

And it’s not that religion doesn’t teach us useful things.  It’s just that when you subscribe to a religion, and you follow it unquestioningly, you are ultimately giving up control of yourself.  It’s fine to have faith.  Everyone believes in something.  But there is a line between having faith and worshipping blindly.  Because blind worship is the reason that the self-help industry is thriving in America.

That’s why I don’t take well to being referred to, even jokingly, as a “self-help guru.”  I don’t think that any real productivity blogger does.  We don’t know everything.  Hell, the only thing that we can be sure of knowing in this life is that we don’t know anything…lol.  My words aren’t intended to be taken as gospel.  They’re intended to provoke thoughts and discussion.  Because there are no such things as absolute answers, and I don’t assume that I can give you any.  Nobody should.  The best teachers will never give you the answers outright.  That completely circumvents the point of learning.  The true teachers just give you gentle hints and systems that you can use to figure the answer out for yourself.  That way, you eventually develop the skills that allow you to progress on your own.  That’s true self-help.

Of course, the self-help industry isn’t completely devoid of solid content, and there are still quite a few bright stars out there that are worth giving a listen to.  My personal favorite bloggers are Seth Godin, and fellow Guamanian Leo Babauta, who are both amazingly talented writers in the fields of productivity.  These guys are extremely good at creating thought-provoking discussions while leaving the ball of personal responsibility in your court.  I also enjoy reading the various contributions over at Pick The Brain, Dumb Little Man, and Stepcase Lifehack, though the quality of the contributions at those sites can vary from writer to writer.  My favorite thing about these sites is that no matter what life path you choose…their advice is intended to help you along that path, not try to push you down it.  If you’re going to seek help from anywhere outside of yourself, I highly recommend avoiding the self-help section at first, and instead try doing a little introspective thinking about your problems, meditating, or visiting one of these productivity sites.  For the majority of people, this will save a lot of time and effort.  And at the very least, it will save you the cost of the dozen or more books you would have bought to reach the same conclusion…;).

If you liked this article, you may also like: Who’s In Control of Your Life? Thank you for reading, friends. May you always pursue the greater knowledge, ask the higher questions, and live your best lives.  Namaste.

Suggested Reading:

Self Help Doesn’t Work

The Huffington Post: Why Self-Help Usually Doesn’t Work…and What Always Does.

PsyBlog: Is Modern Self-Help Just a Massive Money-Making Scam?