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By Root 603 0

either growing or they’re dying. Be a grower. [snicker] To grow, you must stretch your boundaries. Boundary stretching will always feel slightly uncomfortable. Slightly uncomfortable is GOOD. Seek out the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable. I don’t mean to seek out misery. It’s more akin to that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you went to your first school dance or the first time you picked up a game you’d never played before. You will feel clumsy, confused, and lost. If you stick with it, however, you’ll quickly recognize the patterns and the details that ultimately lead to your conquering it. Think about it: If you’re a gamer, you don’t just play the same game all the time forever. You play, you master, and you seek out new titles to repeat the pattern. (Obviously networked gaming and MMOs offer constant change and challenge, so don’t throw Halo or WoW at me to try to discount this idea.)

Uncomfortable = New Experience = Growth

Of course this is scary! Of course it’s risky! But the payoff is worth the risk. No one ever became great seeking only comfort (except for the guy who invented the Snuggie—honestly, wrapping up in one of those is like being in a three-way with two angels). You will fall. You will get up. Then you will fall less. Then you will feel your universe widen and you will be a better human. If you know that you’re committed to growth, then falling on your face isn’t so bad. You can leap up like a mad professor and say, “Aha! I knew it! There was too much drag on that design! Back to the lab for readjustments!” Then you can build a lab and grow out your hair in a wiry fashion to complete the whole Mad Professor aesthetic. I began to more fully embrace the trying of new skills when I asked myself, “Would I rather protect my ego or do stuff in life?”

CHARACTERCIZE

Write down five new things you could try.

Build a mannequin replica of yourself so you can chestbump it.

EXERCISE YOUR EMOTIONAL MUSCLES

The habits you form and the grooves you settle into are not at all unlike the muscles in your body. The more you make the same choices in one direction, the stronger the emotional connections to those things become, and subsequently the weaker the opposite directions become. It’s like building up XP in your Character Tome. For instance, let’s say you’re afraid of flying. Every time you consciously make the decision not to fly because you’re nervous about it, you rack up another few points’ worth of fear. As the months bleed into years and you have an exorbitantly high number of these points, the more you have strengthened this association and the idea of even looking at a plane could make you instantly shit your pants. I knew a girl who had developed such an insurmountable fear of snakes that you had to refer to them as “S’s” in conversation because she couldn’t stand to even hear the word. This is the result of a lifelong fear workout.

FORTUNATELY, you can change your deepest beliefs about something by exercising your emotional muscles a little bit at a time. If you’re in terror mode even thinking about flying, close your eyes and get a still image in your head about what freaks you out. It might be horrible, but just freeze it there. Now, with the picture clearly in your mind, imagine a Photoshop-like interface overlaying it. How would you want to change the image? Make it smaller? Erase out the flames? Fill the plane with cats? Make your changes and then do a mental “Save As . . .” Flying. Or S’s. Or French clowns. Or whatever paints your nightmares.

For me, manipulating the image in this way gave me a weird sense of control over the situation. Granted, emotional responses are pretty dang fast, so it probably won’t change in that moment, but if you keep going back to it little bits at a time and playing with it, your feelings will start to shift. Don’t feel like you’ve gone back to square one if you have another freak-out after doing this for a while . . . It’s all part of the “forming new associations” process, and this would be where you reexamine your fears from the previous