Let Go of Fear and Become Unstoppable: Proven Mindset & Life Strategies
We all create certain expectations in life.
From ourselves, from others, from various situations. We all expect certain occurrences to go a certain way, based on our own past experience, that of others, and that which we are exposed to constantly in the media.
And, naturally, we create our own personal expectations based on all of the above. So when someone or something does not meet those expectations, it is only natural that disappointment will follow, and we start to analyze everything that could have contributed to that disappointment in order to convince ourselves that if things had gone differently, then our expectations would have been met.
But a perspective I’m here to share with you is that, no matter how badly things went, or how unexpectedly, the bottom line is that is exactly how they were meant to be played out in the grand scheme of things.
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My mother, being the all-knowing-wise-beyond-her-years-woman that she is, once told me:
“Everything will happen exactly as it should, as it is meant to happen. Do not try to control it—it is out of our hands.”
Your Struggle is What Builds Strength: Reframing Control to Surrender
The more you try to control, the more that could get out of control because you have already formed expectations about whatever you are controlling. When you have such a narrow view on how you believe something should play out in your life, you don’t allow life to work its magic and surprise you in unexpected ways. And you set yourself up for quick disappointment if something doesn’t go exactly as you imagined it would. I have found that it’s better to leave things up to the universe, to God, to whatever you believe in, and keep in mind that whatever is meant to happen, will, in its own way.
Often, when we encounter disappointments, those experiences end up teaching us valuable lessons and becoming our greatest teachers. They open our eyes to greater things that could enter our lives if we were willing to open up and believe that it’s possible to have more, do more, become more. They enable us to change the path that we were trying to control and follow new, exciting, unplanned, unexpected paths that, in the long-run, were actually meant for us to find all along. It’s just that our tightly controlled approach to life was blocking them from coming in.
I have come to learn that once someone has been through hardship and pain, they are much more receptive towards the good, much more appreciative of all the beautiful things in their life that they couldn’t see before. And sometimes, you have to swim through mud before you reach paradise, because the struggle it took to get there makes it even sweeter to experience.
I’ve definitely sunk and waddled and fought my way through a lot of mud in the past, but when I step back and reflect on what the struggle taught me, I realize how much stronger I became through it all, and where I am now, how happy and impressed I am with what I’m making out of my own life, how inspired I have been by others and how I have been able to inspire others in return along my journey.
I can’t help but marvel at the factors, the obstacles, that got me here today. I am grateful for any pain I ever experienced because it was all part of the unexpected, uncontrollable path that led me here today, as the person I am right now—both a lover and a fighter with uncanny intuition that I can never ignore.
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From Fear to Faith: The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
My advice to anyone reading this is to follow that wild, uncontrollable path and cast your expectations out the window because it, like life itself, is not meant to be carefully controlled…and often times, you gain the most control over yourself when you simply let go of the outcomes around you.
Because living, truly living, is not about gripping so tightly to try and control everything, that you end up suffocating the magic of it in the process. It’s about letting go of the need to control anything at all. It’s about coming into a full state of surrender because you have learned to trust your own inner guidance far more than anything outside yourself. It’s about learning to create safety within so that you stop outsourcing your sense of safety to the world around you.
At the end of the day, it’s impossible to fully control what goes on around you at every second of every day. All you can control is what is taking place within you, trusting that your inner world will then reflect outwardly into your daily experiences.
What Happens When You Truly Let Go of Fear
Once you decide to let go of fear and surrender into a state of trust, you will finally gain control over the only thing in this life that you actually can control—YOU—your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. And once you finally reach this point along your journey, you’ll realize that you no longer become reactive to your own feelings and thoughts. You no longer spiral into fear and anxiety because you’re no longer letting your own inner world control you.
You start to respond differently to triggers, challenges, and stress because you are now operating from an internal system based on safety over fear. And when you start navigating the world from a deeply rooted place of inner safety, you start to realize that you are no longer easily manipulated by external sources. Because everything you used to seek from others—validation, motivation, support, belonging—you now start to discover that deep within yourself.
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How to Flip Your Inner Script from Fear to Freedom
This is one of the most powerful practices I have found to start transforming internal fear into a sense of freedom and confidence. Easier said than done, believe me I know, but it starts with daily self-observation, inquiry, and reflection. Start noticing the thoughts that enter your mind on a daily basis. Start noticing the times when your mind begins to drift into a state of fear. Start observing the internal narrative that is scripting your daily life and behaviors.
For example, one of my favorite ways to reframe my internal narrative is to flip the script on these classic fear-based questions when it comes to trying something new:
What if everything goes wrong?
What if they don’t like me?
What if I try and fail?
What if I waste my time, money, energy, etc.?
Then I transform my inner dialogue into a script that actually empowers me and puts me at ease when it comes to trying something new. I ask myself questions like:
What if everything goes better than I even expected?
What if I try and surprise everybody, especially myself, by what I’m capable of?
What if I learned something valuable, even if it didn’t go how I hoped?
What if I feel proud of myself for even trying?
What if I have fun in the process of trying, and that leads to something amazing that I never expected?
I swear, every time I decide to just let it go—the stress, the worry, the future forecasting into the worst-case-scenarios—and choose to ask more empowering questions like these instead, I always find the one thing I had been seeking all along….
Peace.
And leaning into that sense of peace, I finally feel the most wonderful thing that worry always blocks from me….
Freedom.
From this state of mind, I start to feel unstoppable, unshakeable, and perhaps most importantly, uncontrollable by anything in this world. No matter what is going on around me.
Trust me, cultivating this sense of inner peace and liberation is absolutely life-changing. It starts with intentionally and gently learning to transform your internal dialogue, a little bit each day.
And before you know it, you may find that you have become unrecognizable in the most amazing way.
If this message resonated with you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
