The MONTHLY Motivator - November 2010
Dealing with doubt
Ultimately, the only thing that can completely kill your dream is your own doubt. Your dream can survive every other challenge, and even thrive on them. But if you begin to doubt your dream, and then allow that doubt to grow, there will soon be nothing left of your dream.
Doubt is insidious. You feel it, and you know instinctively it’s there to steal your dream, so your natural inclination is to fight it. Yet that just makes your doubt stronger. Fighting your doubt gives it more legitimacy, and that’s the last thing you want.
Doubts can be sparked by the tiniest little things. Even an occurrence that would otherwise be positive can give rise to doubt. Imagine that your dream is to live in a home that’s high up in the mountains. You know that you absolutely love being in the mountains during all seasons of the year, and you are working each day toward your dream. Then you happen to go for a week to visit a friend who lives in a beautiful home on the beach. The whole experience is very enjoyable. As a result you start to wonder whether or not you really want to live in the mountains. After all, living on the beach is nice, too. Suddenly, a seed of doubt is planted in your mind. It’s not the result of anything negative. On the contrary, it was your positive experience at the beach that gave rise to the doubt. Very soon, though, the doubt can indeed become negative. If left unchecked it can lay waste to your dream. Now it may very well be that you would enjoy living at the beach even more than living in the mountains. If that’s the case, then you can certainly modify your dream. But it’s just as likely that, although your time at the beach was a lot of fun, and it was a great place to visit, you wouldn’t really want to live there permanently. The point here is to show that even positive experiences can cause doubts to arise.
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--Ralph Marston
Copyright ©2010 Ralph S. Marston, Jr. All Rights Reserved. The Daily Motivator is provided for your personal, non-commercial use only. Re-distribution (other than personal sharing) without permission is not allowed.