Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fears fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. Psychologists have a great term for it: awfulizing.
Fear replaces the unknown with the awful. Now, fear is self-realizing. When you face the greatest need to look outside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside your mind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions. When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves. When I was diagnosed with my blinding disease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness was a death sentence for my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness meant I would live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. I knew it. This was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but it was my reality, just like those backwards swimming fish in little Dorothy’s mind. If I have not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. I am certain of that.
So how do you live your life eyes wide open? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught, it can be practiced. I will summarize very briefly. Hold yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, every detail. See beyond your fears. Recognize your assumptions. Harness your internal strength. Silence your internal critics. Correct your misconceptions about luck and about success. Accept your strengths and your weaknesses, and understand their difference. Open your hearts, to your bountiful blessings. Your fears, your critics, your heroes, your villains– they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to see through them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility. I chose to step out of fear’s tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life…
What do you fear? What lies do you tell yourself? How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? What reality are you creating for yourself? In your career and personal life, in your relationships, and in your heart and soul, your backwards-swimming fish do you great harm. They exact a toil in missed opportunities and unrealized potential, and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment and connection. I urge you to search them out. Helen Keller said that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. For me, going blind was a profound blessing, because blindness give me vision. I hope you could see what I see.
TED:What reality are you creating for yourself?
--Issac Lidsky