Fears, Doubts, & Failures: Eradicate Thoughts That Limit Your Potential

People everywhere have incredible ideas, hidden talents, unlimited potential, and reachable dreams, but they spend too much time listening to the voices of fear and doubt in their own minds that they thus never take a risk and put forth the necessary action required to realize those goals, dreams, and potential. They fail because they don’t attempt. Fears are thoughts of unnecessary worry and often demonstrate an inability to control one’s thoughts. Doubts are voices in one’s mind, or thoughts created by the irrelevant comments of others. Failures are events, not people. And the only limitations in life are the one’s we create, believe, and nourish within our own minds. Thus, allowing fears, doubts, and past or potential failures to occupy our mental energy is perhaps the greatest reason as to why one’s full potential is not realized and success is not accomplished, because such thoughts always result in inaction. Overcoming fears and doubts, as well as dealing with necessary and inevitable failures, is simply a challenge of learning how to discipline and control our own minds.

And yet, as important as developing the ability to control our mind is, one must realize that this is not a one time event that is suddenly achieved. Eradicating fears and doubts and controlling our minds is a daily process and effort – regardless of how many times we have successfully done it in the past. Fears and doubts will always reappear – the difficulty is to continually challenge them, and to never give in to indecisiveness, idleness, mediocrity, failure, or even procrastination.

Isn’t ironic that the majority of people put off or procrastinate their goals and dreams under the assumption that when circumstances are different the goal somehow will be easier to obtain. They also wrongfully assume that with increased age, wisdom, time, and money that somehow fears and doubts will likewise dissipate. People need to stop waiting for future events to come and heal their present problems – for when those events come, they become the present problems and they go on continually waiting for future remedies.

Thus, procrastination does not occur because of a lack of time, knowledge, money, or ability – often procrastination happens because of one’s fear of success and the work required to obtain that success. The majority of people are often frightened by their own potential and the effort necessary to accomplish their goals. Truthfully, it is our abilities not our weaknesses that scare us, it is success and not failure that is often harder to deal with, and realizing our full potential and the accomplishment of our dreams is certainly more difficult than the ease of mediocrity.

Goals and dreams are not achieved because fears are lived. Potential is not realized because doubts are listened to. Success is not accomplished because failures are not learned from. And worst of all, indecisiveness, lack of belief in self, inability to dream big, and habits of inaction breed increased fears, doubts, and failures. Contrastingly, taking risks, overcoming the voices of fear and doubt, learning from failure, and consistent action produces increased confidence, courage, belief, experience, abilities, knowledge, and success.

Therefore what? What does all of this mean? These words must be more than just nice philosophical and inspiring thoughts. If this article does not initiate a change or an increased action, then unfortunately an article will it remain. The challenge is to commit to change – changing your mentality, taking action, overcoming fears and doubts, and doing this often! Whenever your mind produces a thought of fear, doubt, or dwelling upon past or potential failures – you must learn to eradicate that thought. Do recognize however, that fears are important in many ways – they serve as a form of protection and they can prevent unfortunate results at times. But most times, fears and doubts are simply thoughts created in our own minds that if heeded will result in inaction and regret, and if overcome and action taken contrary to the fear itself, will often result in goals and dreams being accomplished, full potential being realized, and success being achieved.