Man Up Monday: To Own Your Fear You Have To Face It Often

Fear holds the majority of us as hostages. We cannot live life because we’re too afraid to venture into the dicey situations that would make us feel alive, allow us to improve, and enable us to become stronger. To own your fear you have to face it and face it often, daily even. You have to go beyond your zones of comfort, your areas of ease, and into a troubled world filled with failure and loss, and this is where you create toughness and grit. (Read This: How Fear Will Shape Your Legacy)

Have the courage to do what you’d rather not do, to live a life of action in the face of fears that keep so many of us small and in our own eyes, insignificant.

When you feel fear, take one more step forward. It’s in uncertainty that we forge strength, it’s in facing fear that we become better men.

If we choose it to be so, there is an opportunity within every hardship we face in our lives. Few make that choice. We instead choose to let the hardship defeat us, we give it permission to make our lives miserable.

The control is ours either way, we either relinquish it or hold it firm. (Read This: The Truth About Who Controls Your Fate)

When you head off to work today, know that you’re not just earning a living or feeding your family, but you’re practicing grit. Every time you do something uncomfortable, though necessary, you become tougher. Every time you do more than what’s asked of you, you become tougher.

Always do more and aim higher, not merely because you’ll earn more in the long run or provide more value, but because it will make you a better man.

Life can suck. Truths like this suck. You may have been through hell. You may have been through unspeakable hardship and to hear someone tell you that you are owed nothing may enrage you. But it’s the truth.

It may be unfair and it may suck, but as long as you are waiting to be “paid back” for the wrongs done to you, for the unfairness that life has forced upon you, you will never be able to grow, transform and evolve.

If, however, you use these hardships, you push through them and allow them to make you tougher, stronger, wiser, and more resilient, you will become better than the man who has had no hardship, and you will make him envious of who you’ve become.

Embrace your struggles, they shape you.

Don’t flee from hardship. Don’t aim to find your way AROUND it. Absorb it, be in it, and work your way through it.

It’s hardship that teaches us toughness. It’s hardship and failure that teach us how to succeed if we see it as a teacher, if, however, we choose to see it as a curse, we’ll learn nothing. (Read This: Why Michael Jordan Didn’t Fear Failure)

The power is yours, the choice is yours.

There is so much that you can control in your life because it truly is your life. You can control who you are, what more can you ask for?

Are you training your body and your mind and your spirit?

Think about it. If you’re lacking in one area, aim to strengthen it.

In every instance in life you have a choice. You can choose to work hard or you can quit. You can choose to persist or quit. You can choose to learn from your hardships or you can see them merely as curses that have unfairly been placed upon your shoulders.

The choice is yours, the power is yours.

Our days are ruled by monotony, some necessary and in the name of something greater, a goal, a mission, a life we’re trying to create. We go too far with it, though. We stay too safe. Too much of what is in our life is in our control.

We need to relinquish control, we need to find ourselves in situations where we’ll have to struggle, to face fears, maybe even get a bit lucky to make it out unscathed.

We need adventure. It’s a part of who we are: conquerors, adventurers, we are not sheep.

Spend a day a week in thought, not in action, but in reflection. It’s a great thing to be a man of action, but it’s useless if the action is wrong.

Are you living or merely passing time?

How do you know the answer? When was the last time you were excited? When was the last time you felt invigorated and truly alive?

Do all of your days mould together as one? I’m there. I’ve been living and I’ve been in this state where it seems like every day is the same, and it’s often because we’re hustling, working on something important, but there still needs to be that excitement that can only be brought by meaningful time with family, and adventure.

Find your adventures. You were not made for a timid life devoid of action. (Read This: 25 Ways to Find Your Rebel Soul)

We are not sheep. We are not made to be amongst a herd controlled and cornered into a powerless life where we ignorantly move with the masses and at the behest of our master.

We are lions.

We are leaders, hunters, alphas. We control our thoughts and therefor hold the power to our fate. We can use our hardships to become stronger, our failures to succeed.

Our journey through this life is never-ending, just like our struggle, we’re always on the rise, fighting and hustling and reacting to events however we’d like to react to them.

We hold too much control over our lives to be sheep, yet so many act as if that’s what we are.

Be the lion.

Read This: How to Be a Lion for a Day