The Demons on the Boat

In his lovely book, The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris writes about the Demons on the Boat.

Imagine your life journey is like a voyage on a yacht.  Unfortunately most of us have a set of demons on our boat.  Whenever we turn our boat towards doing something important but scary (asking someone on a date, giving a speech, telling someone how we really feel, starting a new business, writing a blogpost!) our demons appear on deck telling us how stupid we are to take the risk, how it will go wrong, reminding us of other times when we tried something similar and it went badly.  At this point we have a choice  - we can let the demons control our life and move away from the scary but important activity, or, we can pause, check whether there is anything practical we need to do in response to the fears raised by the demons (e.g. find out if the person is single :-), spend some time practising the speech, do some market research to check if our business idea is likely to be successful) and then carry on.

If we do the first and let the demons control our life, they become more and more active and control more and more of what we do.

If we do the second, the demons don't go away (sorry about that!) but we do get better and better at not taking them so seriously. At making brave choices. At creating a life that is rich and meaningful to us.