When you use your will to avoid fear your life becomes predictable and routine. When you no longer avoid fear you recognize that opportunities are literally all around you.
Most people don’t see the opportunities because they’ve trained themselves to look away from anything that triggers discomfort. The avoidance becomes automatic. The smallness becomes normal.
Playing It Safe Meaning: The Crutch of Self-Help
Most of the self-help I see feels as though it’s designed to get you to build compensatory strategies so you won’t have to feel the fear or pain of inventing life in the moment or experiencing the unknown. It’s a crutch within a collective agreement that says crutches are normal because otherwise you might fall on your face, and that would be embarrassing, and people are deathly afraid of being embarrassed.
That’s the playing it safe meaning in practice: avoiding embarrassment at the cost of aliveness.
And yet, that fear of pain masks so much of the richness of living. It’s what keeps you playing small. It’s what keeps the same patterns repeating year after year. Different circumstances, same underlying avoidance.
Celebrating Small Wins
Most of the people I talk to about coaching or goals or life are more interested in celebrating the small wins of their very small life, rather than daring to do something truly big and terrifying and potentially paradigm shifting. Only a few are even interested in considering playing in larger games outside their comfort zone.
There’s nothing wrong with small wins. But when small wins become the ceiling instead of the floor, something has gone wrong. When safety becomes the primary value, you’ve traded possibility for predictability.
The Bigger Game
Here’s the thing: the bigger the game you choose to play, the more all of the projections about why you don’t deserve to play at that level will start to pop up and rear their ugly head. Usually, those projections will convince you that they’re right and you’ll continue to play small.
That’s what the fear wants. It wants you to believe the story it’s telling. It wants you to stay where you are.
Properly dealing with those projections and transmuting them into personal power is what allows achieving true greatness in every area of life. Greatness in the biggest games available. The projections aren’t obstacles. They’re indicators of where the growth is waiting.
Soul Satisfaction
It’s entirely possible to have a very consistent life of small wins and convince others that you’re happy, but for most who really allow themselves to feel into it, while small wins may help you keep up with the Joneses, they are never soul-satisfying.
Your soul wants to play big. It didn’t come here for comfort. It came here for expansion.
Does playing a bigger game sound scary? Feel into that fear, experience it, and use it as fuel to be a massive being of infinite power. The fear isn’t a stop sign. It’s a compass pointing toward your next evolution.
The Roadmap Back
For the person interested in really going big and doing something important and meaningful, for the person interested in legacy: facing your fears is a roadmap back to your soul.
Every fear you face reveals another piece of who you actually are. Every comfort zone you exit expands the territory where you get to live.
How predictable has your life become? That question isn’t meant to shame. It’s meant to wake you up.
This is shadow work in action.
If you’re ready to stop playing small, explore the Shadow Work practices.