I’m 37 years old but still feel like the anxious boy I’ve been for as long as I can remember. While I wasn’t fine with that, I’d accepted it. Until I had my daughters.

Recognize your inner critic. Name it. And welcome it. The inner critic operates out of fear. It’s your job to understand what it’s trying to tell you without absorbing its fear.

It’s always the same fear, the same anxiety. It was there for pre-school, tee ball, kindergarten, college. You didn’t face fearful events every day, you simply attached the same fear to everyday events and made them scary. SO, you just have to remove that one ball of fear and all the day-to-day fear goes away.

When you are feeling anxious, don’t focus on turning down the volume of anxiety. Focus on turning up the volume of curiosity. Anxiety and curiosity are different interpretations of the same energy. Curiosity makes your personal experience of that energy. Why not start there?

View anxiety like an injury that you are working around as it heals not as something that is inherently wrong with you.

The majority of small and big things you have catastrophized day-to-day have ended up being completely positive events. Imagine how much better they would have gone if you had given yourself a chance to enjoy them rather than fear them. Instead of going into events fearing how they might expose your deficiencies, focus on how they can reveal your gifts.

If you feel like you are doing too much, you are not doing enough of what matters.

You need to rectify your relationship with productivity. When you are working, work. When you are not working, don’t work. Relieve yourself of the belief that your only value to the world and the people you love is the completion of activities.

Never downgrade your dreams to match your comfort level. Upgrade your beliefs about yourself to match your ambition, vision, and potential.

You’ve been afraid your entire life. That is going to be your biggest regret–you never got rid of the fear. You never attacked life but just defended yourself from it. Fear has kept you small, your life and potential small. Don’t pass that down to your girls. Give them passion, resilience, and courage. And that has to start with you.

You’ve always tried to navigate the world in the same way that everyone else does–in the safe, approved, least disruptive way possible. Your biggest fear is disagreeing or being in conflict as that means you might be wrong or found out to not be perfect. That minimizes the impact of the things you do. It minimizes your unique contribution to the things you do. It minimizes how you experience the value of the things you do. In aggregate, it minimizes your life. Don’t accept being small because of fear. Take up the room you require. Act according to your judgment, not the opinions or expectations of others.

You can’t train your brain. You can train you body and your body is what trains your brain.

Once you get past trying to be safe, you can start enjoying the pursuit of being great. You can fail at being safe just as you can fail at being great, so you might as well aim for the one you want to succeed at. This is the difference between a risk-avoidant life and a potential-seeking life. Risk avoidance has a shorter distance to fall, so it feels safe. But it also has a very low peak, so even if you are 100% successful, you never truly feel alive and fulfilled. Potential-seeking requires some risk; you could get hurt, but you’re aiming for a summit that aligns with your potential. People get hurt at basecamp all the time and never get to feel the thrill of being fully alive in pursuit of their dreams.