I’m taking another look at one of my quote images, and this one could get mess everywhere…
As soon as I came across this quote from Vincent Van Gogh, my eyes lit up, and I knew it would go well with a photo during a session with some paints.
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint’, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
It covers some key self improvement life lessons, in that the quote contains both a major problem for many people, plus a major solution!
I accept that much like painting, Van Gogh has covered it more succinctly than I could, so I could just leave it there, and let you soak up the goodness in the quote.
I do like to dig a little bit deeper though, so let’s take a further look at how the problem and solution can apply to you…
That’s right – YOU!
Not me, although it applies to me.
Not Vincent Van Gogh, although it applied to him.
Not anyone else at all actually, because although it applies to many random strangers you might pass in the street, the key takeaway I want to put across here, is how it applies to the individual reading it – to you.
Too many of us let too many wonderful opportunities pass us by in life, down to fear.
That might apply to something that you might consider ‘small’ or ‘irrelevant’ like painting for example, or the bigger things in life, like the key areas of health, wealth, career, relationships, lifestyle.
The fear is that ‘we can’t’.
That could be saying that we can’t do something because others won’t let us, or will laugh at us, or it could be that we tell ourselves we can’t because we don’t think we’ll be capable, or it’ll cost to much, or the changes involved will be too great, or that we simply don’t know how.
Now, I’m not about to dismiss fears like these out of hand. They can be very real fears. However, the fears being real does not make them real *facts*.
This is the key.
Fears are, in the majority of cases, just imaginings about possible outcomes. We could just as easily imagine possible outcomes in a positive way, but we tend not to out of self preservation. That idea goes that if we don’t take chances, we won’t fail or get any nasty shocks. That if we keep things as they are, we are at least dealing with what we know.
Hmm.
A lot of the self improvement industry talk about this idea of re-framing the future away from the negative slant and towards a positive slant.
That’s OK, and it’s all well and good, but it does have limits, and I like to use a couple of points to serve as a bridge to get to the next stage.
The first comes from the superb book ‘Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway’ by Susan Jeffers. It really is a fine book, and I recommend it. In that book she looks at this idea of fearing the future, and she deals with it by looking backwards – if we think of times when we feared doing something, more often than not we’ll remember that once we did it, we found ourselves thinking ‘oh that wasn’t as bad as I’d expected’.
When I first read that part, I knew it to be true for me, and it’s true for many. I’m sure you can think of case in your own past.
So, that helps to reframe fears about the future, but to complete the bridge between this and the concept that Van Gogh covers, I like to refer to one of what I call the 4 magic words beginning with ‘A’, which is…ACTION.
Ah, the action.
If our fears are imaginings based on the unknown (which they mostly are), then the absolute best way to deal with them is to turn the unknowns into knowns, and that’s done by taking action.
It works every time, without fail.
Now, I must point out here, that taking action won’t always necessarily guarantee success!
Sometimes life doesn’t work out that way! That’s not reason to let it stop us though, because just as we might not succeed, we might just as well succeed!
Once we take action, we change *everything*.
It could be that indeed we find things are nothing like as bad/difficult as we’d expected, in which case the voice that Van Gogh talks about is silenced.
It could be that we find out we don’t have enough skill yet, or knowledge yet, or contacts yet. This has moved us forward as we can set about getting those skills, the knowledge, the contacts. Once again, the voice that said we cannot, is silenced.
It could be that once we take action and try, we see the stage we are at, and the road ahead of us, and decide it’s not a road for us. Yet again, the voice has been silenced, because if we decide it’s not for us, it isn’t down to any voice telling us we cannot, it’s down to us making our own choice after taking action to find out.
It’s such a key point, and I hope that I’ve driven it home by looking deeper into Van Gogh’s quote.
Look to your current circumstances in the key areas of your life – health, wealth, career, relationships, lifestyle. Are there things you want to do but have been held back by the voice telling you that you cannot?
I’d suggest that you think of Susan Jeffers advice about remembering past fears and how they panned out. I’d suggest you remember my point about action being one of the 4 magic words beginning with ‘A’, and then I’d suggest you tie all that in with the words of Vincent Van Gogh – “If you hear a voice within saying you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and the voice will be silenced”
Try it, it can change your life. It can transform it.
Ok, as ever, I’d love to hear what you think – do leave a comment.
‘Til Next Time,
Health & happiness,
Gordon
P.S. Don’t forget to watch my free video series covering ideas just like this, in my 8 Step Goal Achievement Formula
