The Defining Moment: Courage Overcomes Expectations
Not Much Left
There’s really only a few last things to say now that you’ve figured out your Defining Moment, found a way to make it happen, and analyzed the results. You know now one of two things: what it’s like to do it, or what it’s like to not bother with the whole process.
That’s fine. It’s impossible to do all the things you read about, or all the things that you want to do. This might be one of them, kind of like running a marathon is for me. Not only that, I can give you two reasons why your life becomes harder once you actually go through this process and figure out what your Defining Moment is.
Courage is for the Fearful
“Life rewards those who move in the direction of greatest courage.” — Franklin Veaux
You have to remember that it’s impossible to be brave without being scared. Bravery, courage, those are what happen when you’re scared but you do the necessary thing anyway.
The hardest part of the Defining Moment is having the courage to admit what your dream actually is. It almost certainly is not what you are doing now, or what other people expect you to do; if it were, why would you be reading this? As the previous chapters have shown, it’s not hard to actually make it happen — it’s simply a matter of taking the time to do the work.
The hard part is when that dream runs against your external expectations. When you tell people (or just show them) that you’re going to be sailing on the lake even though everyone knows you can’t swim; when you say you’re going to write a book when everyone knows you’re actually good a math. The world is full of stories of people who have had to counter the expectations of their environment and the people around them in order to make their Moment happen.
It’s hard, but it’s doable. In some ways it becomes easier because you’ve got an external opponent to work against. I know that there was a moment in boot camp when I would have given up except for one thing: I was not going to let my future father-in-law be right in his expectation of my failure.
So I succeeded, instead, just to spite him. Ooh-Rah!
The Harder Part
Sure, it sucks to be the only one who believes in your dream. But what if you don’t even have that ally? What if you go through all the analysis of the first few chapters and you’re left looking at a piece of paper that has something on it that contradicts your own expectations of yourself? Opera? But I’m in my second year of business school! or Stay home with my daughter while I build my niche website? But I’m supposed to be the breadwinner! or even just I can’t do that for a living, because I enjoy that, and I’m not supposed to like my job.
If that’s what you’re facing, it’s a much harder path to navigate. In fact, I will be blunt: it’s beyond the scope of this website. That’s the kind of thing where you might need to look for the help of a therapist and do a whole lot of internal work to get to the point where you and your expectations of yourself are on the same side.
It’s not an easy road to follow. It is quite possibly impossible for many people, which is why blogs like this keep coming around. Because you might be one of the lucky few for whom it’s not impossible — for whom the path is simply hard.
And hard is easy to get past. Just put one foot in front of the other, one word after the other, one thing after another.
What are you waiting for?
“Change happens when the pain of holding on becomes greater than the fear of letting go.” ― Spencer Johnson
