Face your weakness

Everybody had a moment in their life when the voice inside your head starts pounding against your eardrums, telling you you’re too tired, too sick, or too weak to go on. Or a moment when you convince yourself you’re too fat to wear that dress, too old to play that sport, or too green to do that job. It’s a sensation so overwhelming that you find yourself practically submerged in it, like a liquid skepticism, viscous and disgusting. You rationalize, “Hey, it’s alright… it’s just the way things are. Those dresses are for skinny minnies, those sports are for the young bucks, and that job… well, I’ll bide my time and get there eventually.” But deep down you’re hating yourself, resenting your size, your age, your inexperience, or whatever relative weaknesses you have. You wish you were more fearless, more driven, and more secure, but life has taught you well your incapacities and it’s not your place to argue.

The truth is we’d much rather assume defeat than face our weaknesses head on—far better to avoid the mirror than risk a humiliating sidelong glimpse.

A lot of people go through their life constantly hiding from their weakness instead of facing it and getting done with it. Nowadays we live in a world where everybody is build up out of their insecurities and fears. Most people live through their fears instead of living through their dreams.

Everybody is used to finding an excuse for everything instead of for a way for everything. In order to truly grow we must be willing to live on the margins and step outside our comfort zone, in many cases risking failure. We need to tap into stores of courage and determination that most days lie collecting dust. If we don’t, they lose their potency and condemn us to chronic intimidation.

We begin to identify more with what we can’t do than with what we can. This is because, in the absence of real confrontation, our doubts become our reality. It doesn’t matter how irrational or ill-conceived the reasoning, the man obsessed with his age looks older by the day; the woman refusing to try on the dress grows less and less likely to ever wear it. If we keep inundating ourselves with notions of inability, we will always struggle to improve.

The only way to overcome doubt is to welcome it, face it, and test it. We have to invite our weaker sides onstage and see how fragile they truly are. And more often than not it turnes out that our weakness becomes our strength...just face it!