Can you overcome fear?
When we first started dreaming about living on the road fulltime, many fears and doubts came to the surface.
What will happen if I leave my job? How will we pay for health insurance? What if we run out of money while on the road? What’s going to happen if we can’t find work? What if we FAIL?
Can you overcome fear?
To be honest, I’m not really sure. Many of these fears still reside within us but what I do know that we can choose to let fear paralyze us or use fear to our advantage. How so?
Whenever fear crept in, we tried our best to use it to motivate us.
For example, “What happens if we run out of money”. Instead of letting this fear hold us back, we did a lot of research, looked at our budget and built up our savings so that we could avoid running out of money on the road.
This helped us feel more confident and reassured us that this lifestyle is possible and worthwhile. More importantly, it helped us make progress.
If you overwhelm your fears with action your fear has less power and precedence and you can start to gain momentum. Could we still run out of money? Sure! Especially if Jay doesn’t tone down his photo/video gear purchases. 😛 In all seriousness, we can’t predict what unexpected expenses life will throw at us but we’ve done all we can to keep this fear on the sidelines.
We’ve learned that we can overwhelm fear but what happens when we don’t take action?
My business coach, Ariana Blossom, taught me that when we stay paralyzed by our fears, judgment starts to build on top of the fear. Which sounded a little like this for us…
Who are you to want this lifestyle? Shouldn’t you just be happy with what you have? You have a good job that pays well, why give that up? You won’t succeed at this lifestyle.
Judgment keeps us paralyzed in our fears. Actionless and unmotivated.
Do you have a dream that’s been tugging at you deep down but you feel stuck because of fear and judgment?
Your dream might seem far off and impossible right now. 5 years ago we dreamt about living on the road with no idea of how we’d actually be able to get to this point. That’s why we started small. We knew we wanted a camper. So we researched travel trailers and decided we loved the functionality and design of Airstreams. We had an upcoming trip to Seattle and found an Airstream on Airbnb so we booked a few nights so we could see if we liked staying in one. These were small steps that helped us get closer to our dream.
We have 3 questions for you…
We’d really appreciate any answers you’re willing to share with us. We’ve created an online survey version or feel free to respond to these questions by using the comments section below!
1. What do you dream of doing? (Seriously, ANYTHING) Ex. I would start my own shark circus.
2. What are some of the fears and doubts you have about pursuing this dream? Ex. Not getting eaten by the sharks.
3. What’s one simple thing you could do today to take action towards this dream? Ex. Research what kinds of sharks are best to train and are least likely to eat me.