Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Bed Head Chronicles. Today, I want to talk about — I was remember back to when I just started triathlon and I was 23 years old and I had been in a place growing up where I was just nervous and anxious all the time. I had a horrible case of OCD. When I finally turned myself around, one of the things I said to myself was “I’m going to do something that scares me every single day.” Not things, you know, scaring myself with things I had no control over, but acutally going out and doing things that scared me. At least one thing, every single day. Whether that was saying hello to someone that I wanted to meet, and having the courage to say hello. Or going and riding up a hill that seemed so steep that I was terrified. Or descending without holding on to my breaks the whole time. Or whatever it was — just doing something that scared me every single day.
And what happens is, as you start building up your courage, those things become bigger and bigger that you take on. Leading me to my final coach, Brett Sutton, who the training he gave me absolutely terrified me every single day. I didn’t know how I was going to survive it. But I just went in and decided to be afraid and do it anyway. That’s what courage is. Courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. That’s what I did every single day. Building up my confidence and building up my threshold of how scary something would be for me to take it on.
And, what I realized that is so, so important in all of our lives is: How can we ever know what we are truly capable of if we’re not trying to do what we don’t think we can every single day? You have to, at least, try. You’ve got to step in. You need to be courageous. And go for it. Give it a chance. Because if you don’t try, you’ll never know. And what I discovered is each time that I stepped in and was terrified, but I did it anyway, it brought me to all new levels in my life. So, live life to the fullest. Trust in yourself. Be courageous. And do something that you don’t think you can every single day.
