In our family, we each make a bucket list of 10 things we want to do before summer kicks the bucket. On my daughter’s bucket list was diving off of the high dive. She had not yet crossed it off and came to me with this question. “When I think about diving off of the high dive, I feel scared. When I think of not doing it, I feel like a wimp. Which is worse?” A perfect invitation to talk about how a life of fear is a life of limitations. I shared with her how over the short term we more often regret what we do but as time goes on, we regret what we don’t do. When she thought about how she’d feel if summer got away without her doing something she truly and deeply wanted to do, it gave her courage to try. And she discovered a truth known by the most successful people I know — the more we practice doing something that we fear, the less we fear it. Dive, Baby. Dive!
