As the CEO considers the innovator’s new proposal, she approaches the rim of her comfort zone where the mind and emotions start working overtime. What really happens is he feels afraid. Why not indeed? There’s a risk staring you in the face. You’re being challenged to do something new or (God forbid) see things in a new way. The mind does not like this. It likes the so-called comfort and security of being right. It is being asked to give up its treasured possessions – its points of view, its opinions. It can fight (literally) to the death to feed its insatiable need to be right – absolute terror of being wrong.
Some of the ingredients that rob you of happiness
You may very well win the fight to be right, but the price you will pay for resisting your destiny is – pain. The comfort zone is a misnomer. Comfort is often paid for in stress, resistance, dis-ease, sickness, addiction, and loss of self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence. Some of the many all-too-human ingredients that get their life from your store of happiness – and give nothing back.
Being honest is not one of the mind’s favourite pastimes either. It’s hardly going to have you say in a board meeting, ‘I don’t want to do this because I’m scared of violating the precious self-image I have cut and polished so carefully for your admiration.’ ‘Or I simply do not believe in myself or my people enough to risk this.’ So it looks into the crystal ball and asks the future. Future says ‘NO!’
Next comes the need to justify your response. The mind likes ‘reasons’. They make sense. You need an arsenal of reasons at your disposal so that at some point, the innovators will realise the reasons are ‘perfect’ and will stop hassling you to make changes. One of the best is, ‘We have no budget for this kind of enterprise.’ Not only does the reason make sense, it feels right, it is compelling, it is dangerous to argue against.
So, congratulations. Once again you’ve covered up your fear with perfect rationalisations. You’ve avoided the disaster your crystal ball says will befall you. But you also lost the opportunity it offers. And damned up the energy your true destiny would liberate.
But what’s really going on?
FEAR is an acronym for ‘False Expectations Appearing Real’. In fact anything and everything we entertain in our imagination is treated as if it were real by the body and emotions. When we look into our crystal ball, we believe we’re seeing the future, but what we’re really ‘making real’ is some event in the past, of which the proposed future reminds us. If that past event was unpleasant or traumatic, the defence mechanism generalises, kicks in, and convinces us the same (or even worse) will happen if we take this risk. Although this feeling is generated by an illusion – it’s a damn good one. Illusions like this drive the entire human race. Very few of us dare to stand our ground and call its bluff.
Often these past events are when we were punished or humiliated as a kid and felt petrified, bad, wrong, disgusting, or guilty. These forgotten feelings haunt us. They create a false self-image. A false definition of who we are. A false dystopian future that sullies our present experience. And stops us being who we really are.
Our greatest fear is that our false self-image is the truth. We will die to keep this covered up with fig leaves.
The way out of this dilemma and the way forward into your true destiny is to bring that past into awareness, look at it through the eyes of the true self you really are now. Only through the eyes of truth can you see the lie. Only the true you can change the lie you made up back then into a truth you can live by right now.
