Overcome Fear and Embrace Challenges

(ethereal music) Headspace Studios. Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning. I hope you had a good weekend. Now, I guess we all do different things with our weekends. I have one friend in particular who spends most of his time hiking in the mountains or he is on a motorbike. He likes to do sort of adventurous things. And just over the weekend he hiked for about 35 miles. Now, for most of us I think that would be a fairly sort of daunting task, even for him actually. And know, know, he loves these things that challenge him and push him sort of to the next level. Even for him and the group that he went with, that was an exceptionally long hike especially as it was up into the mountains. It was cold. It was snowy. There was no real kind of way down other than to follow the trail to the end of it. And in talking to him, gotta say, actually felt quite inspired about the idea, not necessarily of hiking 35 miles. That didn't inspire me, but it did inspire me in the sense of challenging myself in doing things that maybe, I don't know, I've perhaps been a little reticent about doing or that I've wanted to do and haven't done for some reason. And it reminded me of a project we were working on a few months back where we went to interview various researchers around longevity and really sort the resilience that people are able to find in life through really difficult challenges. Some of those challenges are through choice and some you know, in the case of imprisonment and that kind of thing, obviously not through choice. And the interviewer was asking, "So are you saying it's this old idea of whatever doesn't kill you'll make you stronger?" And the researcher said, "No, not really. It's more whatever doesn't kill you makes you realize what you are actually capable of." So often we look at challenges and you know, we shy away from them if they're outside of our comfort zone. We might even look back at things that happened long ago and hope that they don't happen again. And of course, we don't want to deliberately put ourselves in a position of harm, or anyone else for that matter. But there are things that we avoid in life because we don't believe that we're capable of them. And then somehow life ensures that we have to face that at some time. And in facing it, in trying it, we realize actually we were capable of it. And that brings a greater sense of confidence. And it's not a confidence that's made up in the mind. It's not an artificial confidence or an arrogance or a pride or anything like that. There's just a sense of freedom in knowing that we can do that thing. And actually we are probably capable of a lot...