It’s comforting to know how my thought process works.

It has taken years and years to understand my patterns, and now that I can figure out exactly what triggers me, especially when a new opportunity intimidates me, I can now manipulate my thinking into turning my mood around. But right now, this is as far as I can go. I still have that negative chatter in my brain that holds me back repeatedly. It knows me well, and it knows my patterns for how to disable me. These days, though, when I get that feeling, I start to write.

You see, when a new and really brilliant opportunity presents itself to me, my thought patterns have a very standard way of working.

It starts with excitement. Now I know this as a rush of dopamine, a mood enhancing hormone, rushing into my brain. I think of all the awesome things I can do, buy, go, the people I can help, the freedom I will experience.

Then a few hours later, that high I was on drops into total mental chaos: a mish mash of strong hesitation, self-doubt, constant second-guessing and then out right mockery of the fact that I could ever really carry that thing through.

So until recently, one of two things would happen: either I would never finish what I started, or I would never start at all!

Do you find this thinking pattern familiar?

Do you find yourself excited at the beginning of a new idea, project or goal, and just as quickly as the concept came to you, you drove it right out of your mind?

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Why do we refuse to give ourselves permission to stretch ourselves, to go a little further, to push a little harder, so that we can discover who we really are?

When we were children, we were all born with so much excitement, curiosity and wonder about the world. We knew exactly who we were, and we also knew we could be anything. But the world is broken, and those who took care of us made sure to pass on their broken, wrecked ideas and beliefs on us. Some of us had those beliefs passed down to us in painful and unforgettable ways, and so we grew up broken as well.

Now as adults, the idea of believing any further than the reality we experience right now, is unfathomable. With our self-esteem and confidence ripped down to shreds, we have constant arguments with the occasional visitor that is greatness. We argue with anything that could help us evolve. We do not believe that we can be any more than who we are right now.

And this is why, we hardly ever finish something of real significance that we start. We talk ourselves out of it. We trivialize it and pretend it was never that important in the first place.

But who are we fooling?

The truest truth I have ever experienced, is that you will only truly know who you are once you do, or embody a character that scares the living daylights out of you. Something that stretches your comfort level, something that tests every belief that you have owned about yourself, beliefs that have crippled you so badly, you are not even aware how much damage you have caused yourself.

I wonder, will we continue being damaged human beings, believing in what is said about us and simply agreeing without argument, or will we test the theories, extend ourselves, challenge our deepest insecurities, rise above our darkest demons?

Will you finish what you have started?

I most certainly will.