An athlete analogy shows how avoiding painful memories keeps you stuck in fear. Ask yourself: if you faced that past situation now with your current skills, what would you do differently? Facing difficult emotions transmutes avoided energy into clarity and accelerates growth.
Chapters
Let me put this in a nice analogy for you. If you're an athlete and you played a match that really hurt you, that you lost, and you still got the hurt inside you, it's not been reconciled. We're now going to be in a state of avoidance because we don't want to feel hurt. So instead of resolving that memory, which, by the way, you can do right now just by asking a simple question, which is, what would I do with who I am now differently? If I was to go into that circumstance now with all the skills and strengths that I have today, what would have happened? What would I have done differently? That's reconciliation. That's actually changing the memory, which is going to change how you look ahead to your circumstances. And you would have reconciled the memory. You won't be living from fear anymore. You'll be living from reconciliation. So when we don't do that, okay, when we just keep memories of pain and hurt and avoidance, we end up Imagining things that we want to avoid. We don't go into embracing difficult moments. We actually go into avoiding. So if there's some intensity coming up, that's going to be the catalyst for you to break through. We might unconsciously avoid intensity. Now, everybody knows as a professional athlete that intensity is also part of the journey, right? So if we're avoiding part of the journey that's going to give us our breakthrough, then obviously we're not going to— we're going to delay our breakthrough. But it's just a delay. It doesn't mean you're not going to get there, right? It's a longer path. Everyone's, everyone's got their own path when they're ready to embrace fear, when they're ready to embrace difficult feelings, when they're ready to embrace difficult moments. And you've all got your personal difficult moments. So when a person is ready to embrace difficult moments, difficult feelings without running away from them, then something happens. We end up transmuting that energy that we were trying to avoid. We end up embracing it. We might feel uneasy. We might start to cry, whatever the case may be. But we're actually feeling it for the first time instead of rejecting it, avoiding it, and trying to get away from it. And what happens when we actually embrace those feelings and don't run away from them is we can then get clear on what needs to happen next, right? We can actually gain clarity from going through that experience rather than avoiding the experience and not taking any lessons from
