Insurgent Tip by COMMON
COMMON’s CEO, Mark, likes to take long, solo walks in the woods to help him unplug and hang out with his own mind. On one such ramble, around the three-hour point, he realized he needed to hurry up and get home — so he started taking some shortcuts. These shortcuts eventually ran him up against the bank of a stream, giving him two choices: either walk alongside the stream (and further extend the time it would take him to get home) or just jump over the stream and continue on his way.
With the onset of evening, jumping was the obvious choice. It wasn’t a particularly wide stream — maybe six feet at most — and was roughly knee-deep. Certainly not enough to trigger any fear of drowning. And yet, Mark noticed that convincing his body to actually take the leap was an unexpectedly Herculean task. Even though he had already decided on a rational level that jumping was the way to go, staring at that stream still kicked up a whole lot of internal resistance.
When he tried to dig into the why behind the feeling of hesitation, he found himself scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses to not jump. “What if my shoes get messed up? What if my feet get wet? What if….?” Small reasons for being afraid to touch the water became so large in his mind that he stood there, locked in internal debate, for several minutes.
