You're not lazy. You're just afraid.

You’re not lazy, you know.

You’re just afraid.

That’s why you buy up self-help programs and sign up for e-courses and then don’t actually implement the changes.

You’re afraid, hon. Just afraid. No biggie. We all are.

You think you’re missing something. You think that other people “get it” and you don’t.

Nope. There are only two things happening when other people seem to be having a smoother time.

One is that they are completely full of shit. Posturing. Paddling hard in a sinking canoe. Looking good on paper, but unable to look themselves in the eyes when they wash their face at night. Tired. Oh, so tired.

The other is that they are comfortable with their fear. It arises, but because they don’t resist it, hate it, or try to get rid of it, it doesn’t suck their energy dry. They’ve developed tools and strategies for walking through the fear–because it’s part of life, part of how things just go.

It’s not that you aren’t working hard enough.

It’s that until someone pairs a willingness to feel their fear with prioritizing their own accountability to themselves, it’s hard to get much of anywhere.

You need two things:

1.) Willingness to feel your fear, and

2.) You need to prioritize your accountability to yourself.

Why you quit on stuff

You’re not lazy. You’re just afraid. You quit because you’re afraid, and you’re shutting down your fear in any number of ways, instead of dealing with it.

It seems like something of a paradox, but when you shut down your fear, you also shut down your passion. You can’t selectively shut down any emotion. Dr. Brene Brown says this about working with shame (hat tip: shame? Also falls under the umbrella of fear).

That’s the problem with shutting down fear–you also close yourself off from the good stuff that’s going to get you through every single hard time.

When you let passion rule your realm, you’ll move mountains to get shit done, and it will only feel like “work” in that good, “head hitting the pillow at the end of the day feeling satiated” kind of way.

You’re not lazy; you’re afraid

When you stall.
When you procrastinate.
When you make two steps of progress and then five steps back.
When you lie about your progress.
When you don’t tell anyone of your plans so that you’ll never need to lie about your progress.
When you tell everyone of your plans so that you’ll be accountable, and it totally backfires.
When you sit down with your lucky pencil and a perfectly quiet work environment and then suddenly it’s all too quiet and you just gotta get out of there and go to the coffee shop but then at the coffee shop you can’t fucking concentrate.

When all of those things happen, you’re not lazy. You’re afraid.

Hopefully, you’re not too afraid to decide that today’s the day you’re going to…deal with it. Even if it scares the bejeesus out of you to make even one step in the direction of your soul’s calling, that’s exactly what it looks like to work with and through your fear. That’s exactly what it looks like to be with it.

No superhero antics required. Ordinary courage is all it takes.