Our minds love to catastrophise, don’t they? It’s due to our imaginations loving to exaggerate the negatives and minimise the positives.
When it comes to trying something new, doing something different, going somewhere we’ve never been before, our minds see these as threats, because these things are unfamiliar.
Even when our own reason and logic tells us that there’s nothing to be fearful of, the internal response, the feelings that arise, they can convince us that this unfamiliar thing is dangerous. Therefore, we don’t dare even try because it’s too scary or because our minds have exaggerated just how difficult it’s going to be.
The thing is, it’s only when we do the things we fear most or that we believe will be oh-so-difficult, that we’ll discover that they weren’t difficult at all.
As the quote by Seneca says:
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
