Imagine for a moment you are standing in a hallway along the wall in front of you there are doors and each door is labelled with something you desire in your future, perhaps more money, new job, live in a different country, a new relationship, a fitter healthier lifestyle..
Now look behind you at the wall of doorways behind you, these doorsways are all open and above the doorway a label describes everything that is wrong with your life, maybe commitments and responsibilities, struggling to pay bills, boring job, bad diet, going nowhere, drinking too much – I'm speculating, but take a moment to label these open doorways for yourself.
You are standing in the middle with everything you want behind the closed doors in front of you and everything you don't want through the open doorways behind you and you can turn around and go back through any of those doors any time you want.
You have another choice though, you can also open any of the doors in front of you and step through any time you want, however, you are gripping a rope attached to the wall behind you. You know you can let go of the rope any time you want and walk forwards, but you hang onto it and don't let go because between you and the doors of your preferred future, there is a big empty hole labelled 'The Unknown" and you are afraid of the unknown.
You look at the doors behind you and think about all the things you don't want in them and you grip on the rope tightens even more. As your grip tightens, you are compelled to look into the open doorways and you can see down the wall, even more doorways you hadn't noticed before with even more stuff you don't want and your grip tightens.
You look at the wall in front of you at those closed doors just waiting for you to open them and step through and your grip starts to loosen on the rope, but just before you let go, you turn and look at the doorways behind you and your grip tightens again.
It seems a illogical really doesn't it that as you look at or think about what you don't want, you are tied to it even more, but this is exactly how your brain works. When you focus on all the reasons why you can't do something or when you focus on your problems they grow, magnify and become even more unyielding in your mind; they become more solid and real and it seems even more impossible to let go of them.
But the irony is that when you do take a leap of faith and let go of the rope and focus on the doors you want to open, you will not fall into that black hole of the 'unknown. As you take that first step you realise what you thought was a black hole was in fact solid, it just needed you to step onto it to give it colour and meaning. With each step the next step becomes clear and soon you are walking towards your future with confidence. The reality of the first door might not be the dream you had imagined, but what you will notice, is that through every door the are more doors which you could not see whilst you were hanging on to the rope.
What makes us hang on to the rope and things in our life we're not happy with? It's the fear of the unknown. Humans do not deal well with ambiguity, with not knowing, so when you can't see through the door to every details in that room, you're reluctant to step in, imagining the worst, but that is your imagination, not reality. Reality is what you make it and you can always step through another doorway and the more you do it, the braver and better you get at it. We're reluctant to take those steps forwards when we don't know the exact path, but the path will become clear once you start moving, you will work out how to get there when you look in the direction you want to go and stop looking at where you've been and don't want to be now.
Whats more, you can always go and hang on to the rope again if you prefer focussing on what you don't want, being miserable, but can you imagine how much better things could be if you let go of that rope.
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Source : articlesbase.com
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