I like to talk to my clients in imagery. Images make sense out of things that normal words and sentences make complicated…like the image of a sleeping lion. You know that if you wake a sleeping lion, you’re likely to get your head bitten off. If you wake the lion, he will roar. And that’s not a good thing.
In the example I use, the sleeping lion is a metaphor for your fears. Your fears sleep. They are quiet and peaceful…as long as you stay in your comfort zone. But get out of that comfort zone, and your fears wake up and they roar, and they bite, and they’re scary! Can you see how that might stop you from going for what you want?
Let’s say you want to write a book, but just the thought of sending a manuscript to a publisher terrifies you, and wakes the sleeping lion of your fears. The lion roars and bites and frightens you back into your comfort zone, and away from your dream of being a published author. The mere thought of something that far out of your comfort zone can wake the sleeping lion.
So many of us don’t try, we don’t take any action, because we don’t want to get our heads bitten off! We don’t want to wake that sleeping lion. We don’t want to wake the fear, so we stay comfortable. It’s totally understandable, right?
Or sometimes we try to take huge leaps into the future of our dreams…but if that huge leap falls just a little short, we end up scaring ourselves back into the centre of our comfort zone, and sometimes the roaring lion scares us so much that we never want to come out of the comfort zone again.
But this means that our dreams stay as dreams, they can never become reality because we cannot take the scary action that would wake the sleeping lion…right?
Wrong.
There is another way.
Baby step and tiptoe past that sleeping lion!
You don’t have to take the big leap. You don’t have to make the grand gesture. In fact, when you break it down, the ‘send it to the publisher’ thought is really premature! Even if your manuscript is written, it’s premature. Most times the manuscript isn’t even written yet, so it’s laughably early to start getting scared by the roar of the lion.
If you find yourself getting stuck at making your big Dream come true because of fear, try this: Baby step. A baby step is something that can be done in just a few minutes. It’s ‘research which publishers I might contact’; it’s ‘write a draft of my cover letter’; it’s ‘buy some envelopes’; it’s ‘write the address on the envelope’; it’s ‘buy a stamp’; it’s ‘give it to a friend to put in the mail’!
A baby step isn’t scary in and of itself. You’re just researching, or buying an envelope, or writing a draft…that’s not as scary as “send my beloved book to a terrifying publisher“. It won’t make the lion roar…he may open one eye and glare at you, but if you whistle and look nonchalant, he won’t realise what you’re up to until the latter steps…by which time you’ve already done the hard work, and the roaring is less effective, because your momentum has carried you 95% of the way…that last bit loses some of its scare potential.
Perhaps not all…but the roaring, biting, terrifying lion won’t scare you back into your cave as far, because in your mind you’ll be thinking ‘I only need to do X’… And that thought will keep you wanting to move forward…even if that wakes up the sleeping lion, because you’re SO CLOSE!
Baby steps are magical – I talk and write about them a lot (see a few of the blog posts here, including the one about cyclists and hot shorts…!) – and I do that because they work. And in this case, they can tiptoe you right past that sleeping lion into the life of your dreams!
What fears do you have that are waking the sleeping lion? And what baby steps will you try to get past him without waking him?
Love
Donna.x
PS if you need some help with defining your baby steps and calming the roaring lion, let’s talk – I do a FREE Vision Session and I’d love to help you move your Big Dream forward!