Every time I look within I hear a voice telling me I should be writing and speaking more frequently. So why have I heard this voice for years but still neglect to take action?
My initial thought is I don’t have the time, but that thought is immediately contradicted by the second voice in my head calling bullshit. I have time to check Facebook daily, I certainly could find the time to write. That being said, then I wonder whether I really have the passion I need to write every day. If I did, wouldn’t I find ways to do it?
I started reading Chogyam Trungpa’s book “Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior” today. In it he says: “We must try to think beyond our homes, we must try to think how we can help this world. If we don’t help, nobody will. It is our turn to help the world”. I guess I’ve thought for a long time that if I was ever going to have any serious impact on the lives of others it would be through writing and speaking. I am blessed that though music and my current job as a financial advisor I’ve been able to impact many lives positively through face to face contact. But what I’m talking about here is impacting the lives of many more people in whatever way I can.
I think the underlying emotion guiding my decisions not to write and/or speak more frequently is fear. I don’t know how many times I’ve told people “fear is the worst investment strategy you can have”, but it’s a large number. Most decisions based on fear will hold you back. I hate to admit to myself that fear is driving this.
In the past, I’ve told myself that I was going to carve out ten minutes a day to write and just post whatever came out on the blog at www.TheDailyTen.net. I didn’t do it – lasted less than a week. I’ve kept the website “just in case”, though.
I also started working on a book years ago called Feed Your Angel (www.FeedYourAngel.com). I hooked up with a mentor (Dave Sheffield) whose encouragement got me writing fairly frequently, attending a writers conference and publishing a “preview” copy. That was all years ago, I haven’t written anything for the book since the one year of mentoring ended.
And I’ve had the idea to do a series of talks (Wayne Dyer did this) locally, like four to six 30-40 minute speeches done weekly or semi weekly on predetermined topics like “love”, “anger”, “compassion”, etc… just to get better at public speaking. I’ve never let myself get serious about this idea yet, though.
Why?
Because the little voice telling me to write and speak is David vs. the Goliath amount of fear and insecurity I would have to overcome to actually do any of this.
In the meantime time keeps ticking away…
I have to believe almost every writer/speaker has had to overcome this in some fashion at some point in their careers… Taking on that Goliath of fear is a daunting task…
Remind me again, who won?
(unrelated note – or is it? Finished writing this at 11:11am)
