Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

We are not born with a tentative stride. In our infancy, we are fearless, ceaselessly pulling ourselves to stand even after we repeatedly fall. We scramble across the floor with innate curiosity and start running with reckless abandon. Acquired experience teaches us to pay heed to the reckless part but it does not teach us to stop running, cease exploring, or to end our curiosity all together. Fear does that.

Fear chips and carves away at our trust. Left uninterrupted, we lose faith in others and in ourselves. We become lowly survivors in a land of plenty. Yes, it is fear that keeps us tentative in an arena of boundless exploration.

In her book, You Learn By Living, the great Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

The act of doing the thing you think you cannot do becomes a revolutionary decision of disrupting ideas we’ve adopted in defining our capabilities. It teaches that our thinking is a malleable and fluid activity that can be engineered into fuller expressions of our divine nature. Humanity has proven this time and again. The ‘doing’ of that imperceptible thing is our evolution.

So what are the things you think you cannot do? Where did you fall or fail and then decide to not stand again? Where did you lay bare your feelings to unsympathetic ears then refuse yourself the gift of vulnerability? Where has one embarrassment silenced your creative endeavors?

Will you disrupt your fears that this is all that is available or let these fears continue to rule?

Begin with one act of reclaiming the resiliency you naturally used as an infant. Pick your willingness back up and move into the energy of doing that one thing. Allow it to become a stepping stone to another thing and soon you’ll revive abilities within you that never retreated.