Pointing to Important Work

[Fear - III]

My friend Jacob is a procrastinator. He says he challenges every deadline to “a game of chicken.” But he noticed something recently: It’s not laziness or lack of discipline. Rather, he procrastinates because he’s afraid—“afraid to fail, afraid of not meeting expectations, afraid of being exposed as a fraud.”

Jacob could villainize the feeling or write it off as weakness.
He could run from it or try to ignore it.
(Many of us do one of those three things.)

For Jacob, fear has become a teacher and guide.

Instead of running from it, he pulls up a seat and listens. “[Fear] points to the importance of the task at hand . . . Fear tells you what you must do.”

But isn't it the very thing fear is telling me to do that causes tremors?

Jacob has an answer.
Practice.
Over and over.
Again and again.

If your work is important enough to fear, then it’s important enough to do in small chunks, over and over again. “You cannot wait for assurance in the face of fear, until you are not longer afraid before you act. The fear will never go away. It is in the doing of the important creative work that fear is stripped of its power to paralyze.”