Hi, This is Wayne Brown from Life Back On Track. Welcome to the latest episode.

In this one, I want to talk about something that has affected my life rather greatly when I was younger, and I see it affects a lot of other, particularly men. Women also fall prey to this. It's, however, a predominantly male thing because it's very much tied in with our masculinity, and that is admitting that you're scared.

When we're young, as young boys, we get taunted, we get teased, we get harassed, if we admit that we're scared. We've become conditioned to hide our fear, to have shame about being scared, so we tend to tie a lot of things in with that. When we make a mistake, we don't want to admit that we've made a mistake. So again, the shame in that we have all of these aspects of our life, you know, if we're struggling, if we're feeling depressed, if we're sad, if we're scared all of these things we get given a stigma, we get shame about it so that we fear putting it out.

The challenge with this, though, is at some point it becomes overwhelming, and it becomes damaging to us. So for me, I know I struggled with this one for a lot of years. What I realised was, after doing a little bit of reading, is that admitting these things takes immense strength. It takes immense courage because you're basically opening yourself up to people's judgement, to their belief system about you.

The part where it becomes truly empowering, admitting that you're scared is when the opinion of someone else and you're admitting that this has no bearing. In other words, you can say you're scared and it doesn't matter what you think of them and what they think about you, that is truly a part of empowerment, which is pretty cool. Now, of course, is it simple to get to there? Not necessarily. It can be very challenging, however, if you're one of these people like I was, and you're listening to this and you're struggling with admitting that you're scared or you've made a mistake or that you're feeling overwhelmed. If you're in one of these situations, the easiest way to get on top of it is to just start with something small and admit it to someone who you can trust and get used to saying,

The more you do anything, the easier it gets and admitting that you're scared, admitting that you're doubtful, admitting that you've got concerns, that you've made a mistake, are all these sorts of things which are normal and they're part of life and even something as simple as admitting a mistake. A lot of the times were fearful of the other person's retaliation. So, for example, if we're at our workplace and we make a mistake, we could be fearful to tell our boss or a supervisor because we believe they're going to embarrass us. They're going to negate us. They're going to do things and say things that are going to damage our self esteem and our self worth, and that may be true. They may try doing that. You can stop that pretty quickly, though.

I've had that in the past, and I've worked out how to stop people from doing that to me. But if you start with admitting when you're struggling, for example, say you don't understand something, someone's explaining something. You go. "I'm not getting that. Can you explain that again, please?" And then you get used to that and then you can admit you've made a mistake, and then you can deal with, however that pounds out, and then as you go along, it'll get easier and easier, and eventually you'll get the hang of it and you will realise how much courage you have in admitting it, and soon it will become a complete non event.

So if you're scared, if you're concerned, if you're worried, if you've made a mistake, you'll just say it because you won't be dependent on the opinion of others for your self worth or your self esteem. So this was just a quick one today because I was talking to a friend the other day and we were talking about this admitting that you're scared and how it's actually showing that you're brave and we had a bit of a discussion about it, and it was a good discussion, and that's where this episode stemmed from, how a lot of people are scared to admit they're scared.

But once you admit it, you're actually brave in doing it. So you almost negate the fear by admitting that you've got it, which is a little bit of an irony. So I just wanted to put this one out there and say to you, if you're scared, if you've made a mistake, if you're fearful of that judgement, that's normal. Everyone goes through that. I want you to know, though, when you stand up and say I'm worried about this, I'm scared. I'm struggling, that doesn't make sense, I've made a mistake. When you can say that and you don't hesitate, then you truly are someone who is brave, courageous, strong and someone who is worth admiring.

So I actively encourage you to go and get comfortable with admitting these things. So, yeah, quick episode today just wanted to put that one out there for something for you to ponder and aspire to and work towards. So keep up the good work. Thanks for listening. I'm getting more and more listeners around the world as we go along, and that's really wonderful knowing that there's people out there listening. If you've got friends or family that you feel might benefit from these podcasts, feel free to pass it on to them.

Also, if you want to give me any feedback or send a question or something like that, there's a link in the show notes that you can click and you can send me a little voice mail and ninety second voicemail because it's always nice hearing voices, rather than reading emails, however, you can also send me an email that's also wonderful.

So anyway, thank you very much for listening. Have a great day and remember, here's to a good life.

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