Dentist, face your fears
ByThe future belongs to the risk takers, not the security seekers. The more you seek security, the less of it you have—and the more you pursue opportunity, the more security you will receive.
The greatest challenge that you will ever face is the conquest of fear in the development of the habit of courage. Winston Churchill once wrote: “Courage” is rightly considered the foremost of virtues, for upon it, all others depend.”
Fear is, and always has been, the greatest enemy of mankind. When Franklin D. Roosevelt said; “The only thing to fear is fear itself,” he was saying that the emotion of fear is the greatest RESISTANCE to pursuing becoming the person you have the God-given potential to become. Fear is the cause of much associated anxiety, stress and unhappiness. When we develop the habit of courage and work to develop an unshakable self-confidence, a whole new world of possibilities opens to us. Just think: What would you dare to dream, to be, to do, if you knew you couldn’t fail?
Fortunately, the habits of courage and self-confidence can be learned, just as any other habits or skills were learned. To do so, we need to go to work systematically to diminish and eradicate our fears, lower our resistance, while simultaneously building the kind of courage that will enable us to deal fearlessly with the inevitable ups and downs of life.
Syndicated columnist Ann Landers wrote, “If I were asked to give what I consider to be the single most useful bit of advice to all of humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, as it will as surely as night follows day, hold your head high. Look it squarely in the eye and say, “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.” This is the kind of attitude that leads to victory every time.
The starting point to overcoming fear and RESISTANCE and developing courage is to look at the factors that predispose us towards fear.
The root source of fear is childhood conditioning that caused us to experience two types of fear. First, the fear of failure, which causes us to think: “I can’t do it. I can’t change. I can’t risk failing. The other is fear of rejection, fear of saying what has to be said to move myself or someone else to action which causes us to think, “I have to, I have to, I have to”.
Based on those fears, we become pre-occupied with the idea of losing our money, our time, and our emotional investment in a relationship. We become hypersensitive to the opinions and the possible criticisms of others, sometimes to the point where we are blocked, we are afraid to act, even in our best behalf. Our fears paralyze us. Our fears put the brakes on us becoming the people we truly are. Our fears create RESISTANCE. Our fears discourage us. Our fears force us to procrastinate…to do anything but what we should be doing.
We make excuses and don’t do what is essential to do to act in our own behalf.
- We don’t exercise every morning.
- We don’t eat the right foods.
- We fail to give thanks for what we have.
- We fail to be grateful.
- We fail to take quiet time for ourselves.
Fear and RESISTANCE are also caused by ignorance. When we have limited knowledge and information, when we surrender our MONEY, our TIME, our INDIVIDUAL POWER to others who are not capable, we tend to become tense, stressed and insecure about the outcome of our actions. We lose ENERGY. We lose time. Life takes on less meaning. We move into BURNOUT. We lose our enthusiasm. It becomes tougher to get going, to do what we know we must do to shape our lives and businesses.
The reverse is also true. When we have the courage to act in our own behalf, to gain control of just one thing, say our health, or our money, or what we eat, or when we take important time for ourselves each morning, we eliminate fear, we take a stand, we improve a part of our lives which impacts other aspects of our lives.
We begin to overcome RESISTANCE, overcome our FEARS and every moment of every day we take back what we might have given up. Our fears never truly go away. In my view, fear is Satan at work. Anything good for you will be resisted by a fear. It has always been that way and it always will be that way.
Those who become all of who and what they truly can be, have overcome fear to move to the next level in their life, in their relationships, with their health, and with their finances.
Dr. Michael Schuster
–For help with dental practice management, dental case presentation, hygiene as a profit center, business plans for the dental practice, dental continuing education seminars and more, go to www.SchusterCenter.com or call 1-800-288-9393
