Just Do It

Relax! I’m not talking about attacking Syria or trying to sell you athletic equipment. This is about courage – not the kind that helps you rescue trapped people from burning buildings, but the everyday kind you need to function in life.

Example: In spite of many years experience as a broadcaster, I am not an expert in doing my own audio mixing with software. The job I’m contracted to do called for a very minor mixing operation, but I had been afraid to perform it with this software. Thanks to the Internet, I discovered that this was a wheel I did not have to re-invent – others had done it, and showed me how. So I did it, and experienced tremendous elation when the simple task was accomplished.

It’s like the time I first learned to replace light switches. There was no opportunity to call an electrician, so I figured it out myself by opening up the wall housing (with the power off!), looking at how it was wired, and using the same wiring on a new switch. Presto! I flipped the switch on an off a hundred times just to watch it work, and wanted to replace every other switch in the house immediately, but resisted it, choosing instead to wait until something was actually broken before I fixed it.

Depending on the complexity of the task, of course, you need more courage if you have to do it yourself. A good friend had to move to another state on the other side of the country with her three cats. Shipping them or finding hotels that would accommodate the “family” was out of the question. My friend decided on traveling by RV, which involved not only buying one, but learning how to drive this large vehicle and hook it up to utilities at RV parks. In the process, she successfully made the cross-country trip by herself, visited more than a dozen new states, and had a built-in inexpensive place to stay in her destination city while she spent weeks looking for the perfect house to buy. Brilliant solution, brought about by necessity.

Similarly, another friend was deathly afraid of flying some years ago, but a new job required her to make numerous business trips. She doesn’t really enjoy the trips these days (they’re work), but she has lost her fear of flying, and has amassed hundreds of thousands of frequent-flier miles to use on international travel at some point.

My wife found public speaking very daunting (unlike me!), but obtained a contract job which required her to do a lot of it. Like my frequent-flier friend, it’s still not her favorite thing, but she no longer loses a night’s sleep before she has to be “on stage.”

It’s a simple fact that since almost all of us put our pants on one leg at a time, we can learn to do what we need to do. When we admire people who have overcome small – or large -- personal hurdles, we should take a minute to realize that it can happen for us, too – we just have to do it.