A recent question on IH got me thinking again about how motivation and procrastination relate to emotions, and especially to fear, and how my own fear drives a lot of my behaviour as I’m working to get Wuju off the ground.
I often find that my motivation is tightly tied to my emotions, especially when they are hiding under a few layers of thoughts. If you’re jumping from one project to another, it could be an unconscious response to fear. It might be fear of rejection, or a fear of being overwhelmed with demand, or a fear of regret for spending a lot of effort on something that didn’t succeed or maybe a combination of all three. While fear is running the show it’s very difficult to make good choices or any choices at all for that matter. It’s also pretty hard to see the fear because of a paradoxical fear of being afraid, which depending on how you were raised may send subconscious signals of being weak for not being able to suck it up.
The key to overcoming fear is to realize that courage isn’t the lack of fear, it’s actually the fully embodied, fully felt and fully realized fear. We don’t like intense movies, fast driving and extreme sports because of the lack of fear – we like them because of it. Fully feeling our fears and looking them in the eye makes us feel alive, and holy cow how much fear and excitement we can find in starting a business!
Everything you need to find your focus and passion is hiding inside your fear if you can only tap into it, listen to it and engage with it.
You can tap into fear with different techniques (meditation, therapy and of course Wuju), but you might need some privacy to do it. If there’s a lot of it and you let yourself go fully, you might turn into a shivering mess in a fetal position for a few minutes while your body processes and releases it. It’s not acceptable in our culture to behave this way after the age of 3 or 4, but that’s kinda the point – that’s exactly how emotions get repressed and that’s the reason we need something like Wuju to help us let go of them. If we could cry when we’re sad, shiver when we’re scared or yell when we’re angry, we wouldn’t need an app to help us.