To continue climbing toward the peak of your potential, and become all you are capable of becoming, you must grow to be brave and learn how to write your own life narrative. To become brave, we cannot look for someone to do for us what we need to do for ourselves. Instead, courageous growth is built on three cornerstones:
1. You must sort out your past.
People are often spending their energy and time covering up and hiding things out of fear that if they became known, other people would find out what a fraud they are. In reality, every human has something they wish they could hide—mistakes, failures, accidents, wrong decisions. The fear of shame and rejection can kill the willingness to put yourself out there and be known.
If you have behaviour patterns that sabotage you from going higher, get help from fellow life travelers who have dealt with their stuff. Then, put the behaviours behind you by replacing them with new, better choices. Otherwise, you will waste away in the valleys of regret and disappointment, rather than climbing higher through the risk, suffering, and cost of reaching the summit of realising who you truly are.
2. You must voluntarily expose yourself to those things which you are most afraid of to grow beyond them.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. Clinical psychologists are known to treat fear of heights or spiders by incremental limited exposure to them over time. This helps people overcome the fear of the unknown or worst outcomes. Have that conversation. Make that decision. Stop repeating that failure. Face it. You know what you need to do.
As an executive in the USA and Australia, I have seen too many highly talented people stop achieving their potential due to fear. Highly educated and experienced people are great at convincing themselves and others that they are not afraid with their bravado and intellectual philosophising. Nevertheless, the wise leader and mentor sees through the smokescreens we set up, will help us to directly face our fear so we can continue to reach our growtential.
3. Articulate your own narrative.
This is a topic I will write more on to help you learn how to tell your story. Telling the story of who you are is best done by you; no one else. Take control of your narrative because it belongs to you. Everyone has a story to tell. Whether you are an individual, a local group, or a business, you are the main character in a plot telling the world where you started, who you were after, and how it all turned out. The stories we tell about ourselves are the key to our well-being. How have you interpreted the events of your life? Life is meaningless until we put the events of our lives into context.
James R. Hull of Narrative First reminds that stories give meaning to our lives by putting everything in context. The idea is not to delude yourself that bad things are actually good. It is, instead, to find meaning in the progression from one event to the next. Narrative psychology is about how to create a framework of narrative around the events in your life and transform the inconsequential into something truly meaningful. It is stepping back and looking at the big picture, rather than just getting lost in the busyness of surviving day to day.