Feed a Soul - Starve A Demon (Part 1)

What are your personal demons? They are those things that eat at your quality of life. They live off your shame, fear, guilt, worry, self-esteem and cause you to view yourself as a victim. We need to learn how to quit feeding them - starve them into submission so that you can move forward. We need to understand the price we are paying for keeping them alive and keeping ourselves stagnant.

The three demons I am going to focus on are:

* Fear
* Negative Internal Self-Talk
* Toxic Relationships

Fear
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." ~ Mark Twain

Fear immobilizes you and prevents you from enjoying and living life in the moment. It prevents you from moving forward toward your goals. The first step is to define what your fears are. Do you fear failure? Success? Criticism? Rejection? What are you afraid of?

Failures are moments where you have risked something and it hasn't worked out as it was intended. It doesn't make YOU a failure. You should strive to learn from the decisions you have made and perhaps make some adjustments on your approaches in the future.

Success comes with new responsibilities. It means having to accept the accomplishment rather than using the lack of success as an excuse. It can be very scary to step outside your comfort zone. You know what they say about the lesser of two evils, we often accept the comfort of the evil we already know rather than accept the potential for more difficulties.

We place so much importance on what others think that we fear that they'll find fault within us and criticize us for them. Truthfully, the only person you need to truly appease is yourself. You need to realize that no one is perfect. Constructive criticism can be a great learning lesson for self-improvement. Someone criticizing your decisions and choices just to be hurtful, don't have your best interest in mind to begin with so you can ignore them. Those who feel compelled to knock someone down in order to lift themselves up are usually just showing their own insecurities. Take what they have to say with a grain of salt.

Rejection comes in a lot of different forms. For example, it might be the rejection of a business idea or a rejection of a potential mate. Rejection by one does not mean rejection by all. Think of how many authors, singers and actors who get rejected on a daily basis. Persistence is the key! They take the insights and feedback provided and learn from them to increase their chances of success in the future.

I like to think that fear is the world's way of saying I'm truly living because I'm taking a risk. By facing our fears, we take those chances that propel us from one place to the next.

Learn to face fear like an adrenaline junkie! Recognize the sweaty palms, the gasp and holding of your breath but take that leap of faith, that first step off the cliff because it causes your blood to race, your heart to pump and lets you feel how alive you are! Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, says “every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit.” The trick is to learn how to nurture that seed so that the fear dissipates and blooms into opportunities.

Educate yourself about the risks, the alternatives, and the possible outcomes. This helps take some of the wind out of fear's sails. Don't let fear paralyze you into inaction.

#100DaysToGreat #FinishingStrong