I (Nikki) discovered something pretty huge over the weekend while we were doing the Advanced Course at Landmark (a personal and professional growth, training and development company).
I recalled being in my first term of HSC during an English exam at school. I got into the classroom, sat down to write the exam and my mind went completely blank. For the life of me, I could not remember what on earth I had prepared. What went through my head was “what if I can’t do it…what if I fail”? And then the panic struck. All of a sudden I felt faint, nauseous, clammy, and my heart started pounding at a million miles an hour. Simply put, I was having a panic attack. In that moment I told myself: “calm down and get through it”. So I did. Somehow, I calmed myself down and I completed the exam.
I didn’t know it until now, but ever since then my whole life has become about ‘calming down and getting through it’. Each time I am struck with potential failure, I literally tell myself to ‘calm down and get through it’, and I do. It’s ‘worked’, so to speak. Yet I’ve come to realise how it has restricted the decisions I make and the tasks I take on in life. I’m careful about what I put my hand up for, and I limit myself from putting myself out there.
I’ve decided that I don’t want to just ‘get through’ life. I am out to make a huge impact in the world. To shift the perception of meditation on a global scale; As a tool not just for calming down, but for lifting the haze of stress in order to gain clarity on what we really want for ourselves and the world around us, and then gaining the confidence to go out there and make it happen. And if that means putting myself out there (in a big way), with all the pressure, potential for ‘failure’, and anxious sensations that it may bring, then I am happy to do it. How about you…What do you tell yourself in the face of potential failure? And how may that be constraining you in some way?
