Why You Need Not Fear Being Afraid

My friend Dan Nichols recently wrote a post identifying fear as the greatest threat to leadership. It got me thinking. I agree that fear keeps many people from living a story worth telling, but it doesn’t have to if we make fear our friend.

None of us enjoy feeling that our story might not turn out the way we want it to. Fear is what we feel when we sense we’ve lost control, when we’re uncertain about what might happen next. When we don’t know how things are going to turn out, we feel fears icy grip tighten around our soul.

But fear is not all bad. In fact, out of our control is what we should be feeling — it is the reality in which we live. When circumstances bring us face-to-face with this reality, we have a choice: let our fear control us, or see it as an opportunity to live a more authentic life.

5 Reasons We Are Quick to Imitate Others

We cannot be authentic if we’re trying to imitate someone else. Sounds simple enough, right?

And yet our default position in life seems set to following others in order to live a story worth telling.

There’s a place for leadership – and a place for following – to a point. But if we are ever going to discover how God has wired us to succeed, we’ll need to step away from following in order to become the person God wired us to be.