Take Leaps of Faith. You will grow wings.

A while ago I had a conversation with someone and we were discussing the piece I wrote a couple of years back for my son’s 24th birthday. It was published in The Huffington Post entitled 40 Words of Wisdom Every Parent Needs to Give Their Child, the one that resonated the most with him for his own life as well as for his son was…

Take risks, take leaps of faith. You’ll grow wings.

We spoke about this for a while and what it meant for him. Here are some of the things that came out of that conversation.

Life happens outside of our comfort zone. We all know that, we’ve all read the quotes and seen it written down in magazine articles.
Life is about living.
Living a full life is a risk. But we’ll never know how good and energising it can be if we sit in our house not doing anything.
We can read about others taking risks, taking leaps of faith and yet we are too scared. We’re scared of failure, we’re scared of the unknown.
Taking risks in the name of living is great. Take them at your pace, you will grow wings and soar.
Fear is simply something we’ve decided to make important, to give meaning to. We can be scared and still do something…the world will not end. We can be scared of going on a date. We can be scared of asking our boss for a raise. We can be scared of having ‘the’ conversation with a loved one. We can be scared and know it’s okay….that we are okay.
Being scared says nothing about who we are.

Speaking with my hair stylist today, she told me of her big dreams. She has really big dreams and those around her worry about them. They say ‘be cautious, what happens if it fails? What happens if things don’t work out? What then?’ Thankfully she knows that it takes leaps of faith, she’s prepared to take the risk. Her response to them is, ‘what if it’s amazing? What if it’s successful beyond my wildest dreams?

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary – Cecil Beaton