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Welcome back, frens. Summer is ending and fall is approaching. Make sure to take some time to watch the leaves turn, eat something with pumpkin in it, and take a walk.

If you’re someone who has goals or dreams about what your ideal life or job might look like, the internet has no dearth in how-to’s, hacks, tips and tricks for just about anything that you’d like to accomplish.

So then why aren’t we all living our ideal lives?

There are many answers to that question but one of them is the fear of not being able to accomplish what we set out to do.

Fear of not being enough, a loss of what we know, rejection, or maybe even a fear of success itself.

Whether you’re an employee, manager, entrepreneur, artist, hobbyist, athlete, whatever, there are probably things out there that are calling your name, things you wonder if you were put on this earth to do.

You can only hope to accomplish these things once you’ve put a name to your fears, understand them and acknowledge them.

And once you do it, it will immediately lift a weight off your shoulders.

But for something so intimidating that we can barely look at, we need a process for how to address and move past them.

Personally, this process helped me completely transform one of the most influential years in my life.

In one year, I went from:

• Working at a job I hated to working at a completely new job that I loved (in a totally different and nascent industry)

• Living in a small city that I had outgrown to living on an island for a couple months before moving to a bigger city

• Being underpaid to getting a $50,000 raise

• Not having an understanding of hobbies that gave me energy to starting a burgeoning writing hobby that later turned into this newsletter

My fears now are very different from when I first started, which is a heartening sign.

There will always be fears and problems, but I’m moving on to better problems.

If you have goals you want to achieve or any desires at all, I’m sure you’ve come across the concept of taming your inner limiting beliefs.

Unsurprisingly, our inner voice and our understanding of our own identity has to be aligned with what we desire in order to achieve our goals. If what we want and who we think we are have a fundamental contradiction, it’s probably not going to happen.

There is no creation and reinvention of our identities without fear. We have to look at it, process it, and go through it.

Setting your fears straight

I prefer to be action-based rather than purely theoretical. What does it tactically look like to not let our fears freeze us in inaction?

I found a nice, short visual to explain the process.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Take the time to really devote some time to this process.

Before you start writing, get in the right mental space. You have got to be honest with yourself.

If you input surface-level thoughts, you will get surface-level results. Don’t waste your own time.

When I first did this activity, I didn’t even really have a clear idea of what I really wanted. That’s okay.

You might need to journal and brain dump before you even start this activity to start teasing that apart.

Once you complete this activity, put it somewhere you can see it. Tape it on your bathroom mirror, above your desk, or make a calendar alarm to revisit it in a month or two.

Set your own goals about how you might approach this. For me, I set monthly goals. It was just the right amount of time for me to check in and make sure that I was aligning what I said I wanted with what I was actually doing.

Photos of the day

Most-interesting-live-footage-of-the-day

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