October is a fitting month to take a good look at your lingering fears. Not the obvious ones leftover from your childhood like a masked, dagger-wielding bogeyman but the more subtle fears that you’ve been able to hide away and cunningly avoid way into your adulthood. Those fears that have been holding you back from your true potential since you started out on your career path.

Those thoughts that say, “you’re not good enough, you’re not ready, you’ve got to learn more, save more, get more experience. Who are you to be the best in your industry? What makes you think you’re the expert?”

We all know there are enough frauds out there claiming that they’re the experts. What I’m talking about are your own personal beasts that you’ve allowed to hold you back from speaking up when you ought to; keeping you from acting on that brilliant idea that you know would be a success if only you had some backers or time to focus on developing it.

At what age do you think you’ll have conquered all of these internal fears? Do you not think that other people might be suffering from the same dis-ease? But possibly forcing themselves to ride roughshod over them.

So often, what we allow to stop us from acting on our own accord is not really fear but raw, sheer excitement. Just thinking about what our life could be or would be like if we could conquer our inner beasts gives us that amazing jolt of adrenaline.

Our day of reckoning is the day we say to ourselves, “aw screw it! I’m doing this thing. What’s the worse thing that could happen? What if I succeed? What if I don’t? Is anyone watching and would anyone that matters to me really care?”

I found that having a strong philosophy about living a full life, a life on my own terms, a life with successes, with failures, with ups and downs was the life I wanted to live. I never wanted to say to myself, I wish I’d done this or I wish I’d done that. Every choice we make has a price, but the price I was never willing to pay was the price of holding myself back, of not acting on my thoughts and ambitions.

I was deathly afraid of public speaking for most of my young life, but because I forced myself to do it and because my first real career demanded that I speak every day in front of my team I got better, I got more confident and my biggest fear eventually became one of my strongest skills.

Halloween is a good time to scare ourselves witless that we might be holding ourselves back and steadfastly headed towards a future of mediocrity. Until now, if we haven’t’ yet faced our oh-so-real-to-us fears, then maybe we can frighten ourselves enough to grab our swords and go to battle in order to win the life we were born to live!!