Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: Why Growth Lives Outside Your Comfort Zone
Growth lives on the far side of fear. The moments that make us most uncomfortable, that make us feel too small, too exposed, or too big for the room, are almost always the ones stretching us into who we are meant to become. I have built my life on that truth, and I want to make the case for it to you.
Where does “Feel the fear and do it anyway” come from?
The phrase comes from psychologist Susan Jeffers, whose book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway was first published in 1987. Her idea was simple and a little radical. Fear is not going away, so stop waiting for it to. As long as you keep growing, you will keep feeling it. The only real choice is whether you let it make your decisions. It became my motto long before I could have told you where it came from, and I mean it literally.
Why does the comfort zone feel so safe?
Comfort feels safe, and that is exactly the problem. Very little grows there. The comfort zone asks nothing of you and gives you back more of the same. It is a soft cage, and the longer you stay, the smaller the world becomes, until safe and stuck start to feel like the same thing.
So many of us were taught to stay there. Be careful. Do not make a fuss. Do not take up too much room. Those lessons can follow a woman for decades, until one day she realizes she has been living a life sized for someone else’s comfort instead of her own.
Is fear a stop sign or a signal?
Here is what I have learned to notice. The flutter of nerves, the too big feeling, the urge to shrink back. Most of us read those as a warning to retreat. I have come to read them as a compass. That kind of discomfort is almost always pointing straight at the place I am about to grow, so instead of turning away from it, I have taught myself to turn toward it.
There is an important difference, though. Real danger deserves your respect. The fear I am talking about is the other kind, the fear of looking foolish, of failing, of being seen trying something new. That fear is not protecting you. It is just keeping you small.
What does it look like to do it anyway?
Courage was never the absence of fear for me. If I had waited to stop being afraid, I would
still be waiting. Courage is feeling the fear all the way through and stepping forward with it
riding right beside you.
I got sober that way, one uncomfortable day at a time. I rebuilt my life after divorce that
way, more than once, which I wrote about in second chapters. And I wrote and published Monarch of the Heart that way, putting something deeply personal out into the world for strangers to read.
So far, I have survived every single thing that scared me. Every one. And I have come out
the other side of each one larger than I went in.
How do you actually practice it?
You do not have to overhaul your life to live this way. You just have to keep choosing the
slightly braver option.
Say the thing. Send the message. Take the class. Raise your hand. Walk into the room where
you feel like you do not quite belong yet, because that room is where you grow into
belonging. Start small and let the evidence build, until you learn what I have learned, that
you are far more capable than your fear has been telling you.
It is never too late to start, either. Some of the bravest things I have done came after my
kids were grown, which I wrote about in the empty nest. And the whole idea behind my
jewelry is the same one, a small reminder to wear on the days you need it, which is the
heart of the story behind the Courage Collection.
Brené Brown makes the same case in her book Dare to Lead, that we cannot always have courage and comfort at the same time, so we have to choose. Her words, courage over comfort, mean so much to me that I have them tattooed on the inside of my wrist. The ink has faded a little over the years, but the meaning is stronger than ever. Courage over comfort. Every time it counts.
With much love for the journey,
Carrie
