Dear Brilliant One,

Surely you’ve heard or read this quote:

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. 

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” 

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is accurate. 

Boldly making a move in the direction of your dreams, big or small, is something like pressing the play button on a series of cosmic programs that play in your consciousness and in the world around you automatically. That’s the thing about a program: You don’t make every step of it happen. It’s a series of preset steps that play automatically.

And in the case of these boldness “programs”, you take the first bold step and that sparks a sequence of opportunities and events that multiply your personal actions and effort BY A LOT, in ways you couldn’t even imagine if you tried. 

One bold move activates “the genius program” within you and all around you, causing you and others to receive the guidance of Infinite Intelligence to be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing to evoke even more genius from each other.

One bold move in alignment with your sacred dreams and contracts activates “the power program”, causing you to be able to energize opportunities and turn your ideas to real, tangible realities with far more efficiency than anything else you’ve ever tried to do before.

One bold move is like pressing play on “the magic program”, where you find yourself able to go from success to success and from glory to glory under grace, your ships coming in over calm seas, the phone ringing and your inbox crammed to overflowing with opportunities you couldn’t even have imagined in your wildest dreams.

But the genius program (#1), the power program (#2) and the magic program (#3) are just one side of the story.

I want to give you a more comprehensive picture of the programs that will begin to play when you make a bold move beyond your comfort zone, so you don’t get blindsided.

Boldness Program #4: The alignment program. When you take even a single, bold step to be your Big Self or do your Big Dream, anything in your values, identity, beliefs, daily habits, calendar, family life, financial life, environment or systems that is inconsistent with that deep down dream will start to get verrrrrry uncomfortable unless and until you make a change. 

That’s why true, deep alignment with your sacred contracts and your True, Sacred Self often feels like all hell breaking loose in your life before it feels like heaven on earth. 

TRUE alignment often feels like a cascade of crises and losses before it feels like freedom, wholeness, happiness or success.

So catch this principle: The alignment program is very uncomfortable. But it’s also very necessary.

Because we’re human and because comfort zones are called what they’re called for a reason, most of us spend a decade or two fighting to stay inside our comfort zones by trying to downsize the dream instead of having the hard conversations and executing the necessary endings to get ourselves and our lives into alignment with our own dreams. 

That’s why I was surprised, when I gave up the inner tug-of-war, resigned myself to the very BIGGEST version of my own personal dream and found every element and area of my life to fall into alignment. It was wildly easier and way more delicious to be my Big Self and do my BIG Dream than to play the role of a small, culturally-compliant shadow version of my self, and it will be for you, too. 

Boldness Program #5: The Fear Program.  

Your whole life, you’ve been taught to hold back from doing things to avoid unwanted consequences. 

This makes sense when you’re a little kid learning not to run into the street. 

But over a lifetime, this reward-punishment conditioning becomes warped and hardened into what I call The Fear Program, and it activates any time you do ANYTHING to get out of your culturally approved lane, or anything that makes you feel exposed or vulnerable to unwanted consequences.  

The Fear Program is at the root of all self-sabotage. You want to do your dream, the fear sparks, you hold yourself back to make the fear go away. 

Every bold move in the direction of your dream WILL ACTIVATE the fear program, because they all make you feel exposed and often, doing your dream WILL create at least a few unwanted consequences in the immediate term. 

Because when you enlarge yourself and your life? You WILL make mistakes. You WILL  feel untethered and disoriented. You might even look foolish, be disliked or receive critical feedback on occasion. 

And all of these unwanted things are actually essential milestones on the journey of your awakening soul and your actualizing True, Sacred Self. Because making mistakes, feeling disoriented, hitting your upper limits, becoming okay with looking foolish or being disliked—they are how you build the muscle of risk-taking, the feedback loop of “I’m okay regardless” and the inner sense of psychological safety that allows you to unleash your maximum creative power and potential. 

The first step to escaping the paralyzing influence of The Fear Program is to begin your boldness. When I first started this work in my own life, I followed the advice of Florence Scovel Shinn and made a commitment to always  do the fearless thing. (And I gave myself an A+ if I did that 80% of the time.)

Do the fearless thing. Then, with self-compassion and awareness, tune into how you feel. Feel yourself hit your Upper Limits. Feel the fear. And watch The Fear Program run, WITHOUT letting it run you. 

Do not let it stop you. Do not let it change your course. Engage wholeheartedly with the subjects that scare you. If you have a financial freak-out, look at that. Learn more about money and your own money blocks. If you have a fear of ending up alone, learn about your attachment styles and primal heart wounds and dive deeper. 

Just keep swimming, Brilliant One. And watch the fear dissolve. Eventually. 

Boldness Program #6: The no-regret program. I’d been teaching “always do the fearless thing” as a Spiritual Strategy for years when one of the authors of Freakonomics published a research paper that validated this approach. 

Economist Steven Levitt had people who were stuck on a big life decision—like whether to quit their job, get married or divorced, adopt a kid, move to a new city, etc.—flip a coin and make the decision based on the coin toss. Then he followed up with them to see how satisfied they were with their decision two months and six months later. 

Two months later, people who had kept their lives the same were happy with their decision. But six months later, they wished they had made the big change they’d been considering. And the people who had made a big life change based on the coin toss—the people who had done the fearless thing—they were happy with their decision two months and six months after making it. 

Here’s the thing you learn quickly when you get in the practice of doing the fearless thing: If things don’t work out, you can virtually always make a U-turn. And if you do, you do it with the self-respect of having tried. But if you never give it a chance to play out, your unlived life may very well haunt you, sometimes for generations*. 

In other words, if you’re perseverating on whether to make a big, bold change to your life or not, the answer is yes. If you can do or dream it, just begin it. There is genius, magic—and alignment and fear—and regret-obliterating power in it.

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Metaphysician
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

*Dr. Jung said that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” Resonates, doesn’t it? Don’t go out like that.

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