Adventuring Beliefs
Excerpt
This article describes what it feels like and your interpretation of it when you are in the midst of a new adventure. We explore some ideas about sensing the excitement of the unknowing and, for some people, the tsunami fear of failure. In addition, we describe these new experiments and ways in which you can make sense of what is occurring. Identified are some beliefs which will help you navigate your tumultuous ride through these discoveries. Many of you have had these experiences, yet you may have been unable to describe and understand with insight what is happening to you during this time; you will gain new awareness.
What Represents New Adventures?
Imagine three types of new adventures:
Learning or creating a new practice or process to help you accomplish something important,
Reading an assigned topic or subject which is mandatory for your job,
Taking a webinar on another topic that challenges you.
Or it could be exploring how to get involved in a new topic, like the image below
Exploring Photography: another subject that typically interests Bob: he took this shot one morning on his walk.
Background
We want to introduce the concept of stoppage. Stoppage occurs in people when we come face-to-face with the unknown, and sometimes our mind works against us. An example of a stoppage might occur today when you begin to follow your daily practices, but you want to do something else this morning. Delaying your regular routines will likely create a sense of guilt or shame, but you do the other thing that comes into your mind regardless of the consequences: this may be considered avoidance behavior. For now, we’ll leave the behavior determination to a psychologist for what it means, and we’ll speak in lay terms.
But more importantly, notice that your mind plays a significant role in this selection. We feel for you if you have experienced this because we have had similar experiences, and we believe most people do.
Feelings
Everyone understands feelings make us human, and we may not like the current sense, whether foreboding or joyful. However, we take actions with some feelings which drive us in many ways, the results of which can be both favorable and unfavorable. We introduce feelings because we want you to gain notice and awareness of your feelings during the new adventure.
We will discuss the excitement of the unknown first, followed by fear.
Excitement
The feeling of excitement can produce real motivation in us. You will notice that your senses may be on alert and increase when this occurs. For example, alertness affects your hearing, sense of smell, and touch. We describe these characteristics to enable your sense of excitement to ensure you recognize what is occurring. We want you to remain free of judgment about this feeling: don’t sense any favorable or unfavorable condition of the excitement.
In addition to what you are learning, we want your adventurous spirit to be released. You don’t have to celebrate the excitement the way this woman is but recognize how this can increase your motivation to continue.
Fear
Fear is a feeling that is prevalent in many circumstances and situations. Many of us have been conditioned to sense fear given our backgrounds and experiences.
Public Speaking
For most people that don’t normally speak in front of audiences or groups, you’ll likely feel a sense of fear while you are preparing to speak or just before you go in front of your group. You can reframe this feeling of fear by accepting this is a natural condition and you can also believe that the fear represents excitement (e.g. sweaty palms, heightened senses, pounding chest, etc.) which will leave you as soon as you begin to speak. We invite you to consider this will help you remain focused upon what you are presenting. Overall this excitement is a good thing that will serve you well, especially with practice.
Grasping the Unknown
Consider the whole experience of this new situation as an adventure that has the possibility of producing new awareness and insights; many of which can be converted to wisdom when applied in your world. From that belief while you are approaching an unknown, you have the opportunity to gain another perspective that can help you grow to another level.
Understanding Failure
Many of us perceive failure as an uncomfortable reality. Failure is real: your may not pass a test, you may be relieved of your job, you may lose something or someone. There are a thousand ways that failure presents itself to you: you can create your own list of past experiences or perceived anticipations - yet we suggest limiting your list to the top 5.
Let’s consider other ways to inspect the failure. Our initial response to failure is to say “So What” because in our experience, this tends to lessens the discomfort. We also want you to ask yourself some or all of these questions:
Can this be a learning opportunity for me?
What have I really lost?
What have I gained in this failure?
Can this failure serve me or do I serve the failure?
Have I experienced harm?
On a scale of 0 to 10, what pain number am I experiencing right this moment? Where 0 is equal to no pain or discomfort, and 10 is extreme discomfort.
What would have me care about this failure?
Can I sit with the feelings?
How would I move forward?
What alternatives are available to me?
Special Notes
More to come because this blog in it a developmental stage (i.e. while the blog is published, we do this pre-release at times in our creation stage, so we can see the impact of our writing). We want to know if it works and is believable. Our editors check the grammar out, but our release team wants to approve it for full release. We ask you to be patient because the end blog must meet at least an 8.5 on the CAM Awareness Scale.
