When I was in my early 20's, I read a newspaper article about a young man who was killed when a tire he was inflating exploded. I'm sure there were circumstances that I didn't know about (defect in the tire or just plain over-inflation), but all I could remember was the guy was killed. Since then, I've had a phobia about inflating tires, any kind of tire, even bicycle tires. If my tires are low, I'll go to a tire shop and have someone else do it, even if I have to pay them. I've tried to do it myself, but as soon as I start hearing the air rushing in, all I can imagine is the tire exploding and concussion of the blast hurting or killing me.
I got a mountain bike recently but the tires were low. My son Caine, is a bicycle mechanic in Portland and sent me a portable pump. But I still planned to take the bike down to a bike shop so they could inflate the tires. When I told Caine I wasn't going to use the pump, he could sense my fear and told me, "Dad, the tire manufacturers test the bursting point of a tire and the "recommended tire pressure" is less than half of that. There's no need to be afraid."
There's a part of our brain that creates fear in us. It's put there for our protection to make sure we survive. But our brain can't analyze whether the fear we have is real or imagined, we have to decide that ourselves. Most of the fears we have in our minds are imagined because they're based on long-shot, worse case scenarios. If we want to grow in our lives, we have to come out of our comfort zone and fight through "imagined fears" like inflating tires.
All of our growth comes outside our comfort zone.
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