Are You on Life's Roller-Coaster of Fear?

2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV - We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Life is full of ups and downs. Like a roller-coaster!

It’s a journey where you’re likely to encounter much adversity, a place where mountains block the path to your destiny. At times you will be confused, you'll lose your bearings and feel like quitting.

At times like this, you must control your thought life if you want to succeed.

Why? Because your thought life will control your feelings about everything in your life. Your feelings are actually unreliable and subject to change. I’ve learned not to let them in my personal cockpit. Like terrorists, they have a way of hijacking things, and before I know it, I’m off course or worse, in a nosedive.

There’s a battle going on in most of our minds.

The battle of our thought life. The battle between doubt and faith. The battle between I WILL SUCCEED and WHAT IF I FAIL?

If we begin to entertain thoughts of doubt, our minds can progress to full-blown failure in no time flat. All of us have thoughts of doubt. But when one of those doubt-thoughts enters our minds, we have to decide what we are going to do about it.

If we entertain that thought, it will always progress into full-blown fear. Fear is an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real.

When we fear, it’s as though we are producing, directing, and starring in our own downfall-of-me horror flick. We begin to imagine the worst possible outcomes.

Fear quickly progresses into worry where we are now replaying the mental images over and over. Go figure that we are quickly stressed out — FROZEN!

And then worry has its way with us and we progress into discouragement, which is operating without courage. Discouragement then progresses to depression and depression right into failure.

Our thoughts become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Doubt > Fear > Worry > Discouragement > Depression > Failure

So how do we battle doubt?

We need faith. Faith is believing in our success despite our thoughts, feelings, or circumstances. When thoughts of doubt enter my mind, I’ve learned to call them out for what they are — TRAITORS AND TERRORISTS! Seeds of failure that I refuse to nurture.

In fact, the moment I recognize them, I expose them as not my thoughts and then eradicate them from my thinking. I’ve learned to recognize thoughts of doubt even when they are undercover masquerading as “concerns.” Same thing!

You have to be able to call what is not, as though it were.

All success-minded people have this ability. We’ve all heard the phrase, “attitude is everything.” Well, if we really believed it, wouldn’t we all have great attitudes?

Doubters miss out on the fact that our altitude gets determined by our attitude.

Attitude is a matter of focus. It’s what we allow to percolate in our minds regardless of our circumstances, failures, or setbacks. We might get a little delayed, but we are never denied.

Great faith will progress to expectation, a place where we expect to win despite our circumstances. And when we experience expectation, we’ll have peace … ZERO STRESS!

This peace will progress to desire, the desire to keep moving forward through all the mess. And desire progresses to perseverance, which means we’ll hold onto our dreams no matter what, just like a pit-bull holds onto whatever it sinks its teeth into.

It is that kind of perseverance that leads to success.

Faith > Expectation > Peace > Desire > Perseverance > Success

Winning the battle between faith and doubt is what sets apart the success-minded from the victims. How can you build your faith? Through the diligence of having a vision and a written plan, becoming a continuous learner, and investing time into developing yourself.

Seek out mentors who have the battle scars from their journey, and learn from their mistakes.

Be open to reinventing you.

-Gerald