Hesitation leads to devastation by Arnold Groenewald

Hesitation leads to devastation. That was the main principle of an article I read recently on mountain biking. It is one of the most important principles when riding a technical mountain bike route. If you decided to ride the difficult, sandy or rocky or muddy section of the route instead of pushing or carrying your bike, like many of the others, you must “take it by the horns” and go through it. If you hesitate, even just for a moment, you can come down hard and fast, and yes, depending on the circumstances, the result could easily be devastating. You could break an arm or a leg or seriously damage your bike. Why? Because you hesitated.

That one phrase seemed to get stuck in my mind and I have been meditating on it ever since. It is also true in life. Hesitation can lead to devastation there too. You need to take that opportunity. If you have decided to go after a specific goal, and you have counted the cost that it is going to cost you to achieve that goal, and considered all the pros and cons and decided that it is a worthwhile goal, then you must commit yourself one hundred percent to it. You need to take that risk.

Nothing in life that is worthwhile comes without risks. You need to set your sails and go out into the deep waters. As someone once said: “A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for”. And neither were you. You were made by God to explore all the possibilities of life and discover your own world. Yes the chance is there that the storms of life will wreck your boat, but you’ve got to take the chance, you’ve got to turn your boat into the direction of the deep waters and leave the shore because it is the only way. As Christopher Columbus, the great discoverer said: “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”

Although there are more I just want to mention three things that can lead to hesitation:

1. Doubt

You have made up your mind to go for the big challenge in front of you, but suddenly, after you have given the first few steps, doubt sets in. You doubt your abilities, you wonder whether you will be able to see it through. It begins with a thought, and then, if you allow it to grow, it develops into an emotion of fear, and suddenly you become anxious.

We all have those voices inside us that tell us that we are not good enough, that we are not going to make it. We need to shut them down and take control of ourselves and tune in to that other voice inside us that will convince us that we are good enough. We need to do that because it can lead to hesitation and as we know by now hesitation can lead to devastation. It is William Shakespeare who said: “Our doubts are traitors, and they make us loose what we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

2. Fear

If you don’t take control over your doubt thoughts it will very quickly lead to fear. Fear can be a very destructive force. It can stop you from even starting out in the first place. It is true that there is a risk involved in everything that you start, and that implies that there is a possibility that you might fail. In fact most of the important things in life require taking a risk and the nature of a risk is that it doesn’t always work out. But you have to have faith. Faith is the opposite of fear. Fear and faith cannot exist together, if you start believing that you can do it, fear will disappear.

Someone once said you spell faith RISK. The risk is still there that you can fail, but it is impossible to succeed if you don’t have the courage to try. As Wayne Gretzky a well known ice-hockey player said, he missed hundred percent of the shots that he never took. You can only succeed if you do it. Fear can make you hesitate and that can lead to the devastation of your dreams and goals.

The only real cure for fear is courage. Do it afraid, feel the fear, but do it anyway. If you keep on doing the thing you fear, the death of fear is certain. The life that you are living will expand or shrink in proportion to the measure of courage you display.

3. Procrastination

The longer you wait before you start doing what you need to do the bigger is the chance that your doubts and fears will get the better of you. Procrastination leads to hesitation, and hesitation leads to devastation. You have to take action immediately after you have made the decision to do it. The longer you wait the more difficult it becomes. A parachute instructor once said that it isn’t the jump that is bad for the inexperienced jumpers, it’s the waiting to jump that gets to them.

The law of diminishing intent states that for every second that you delay doing what you have decided to do, the chances become slimmer that you will actually do it. Don’t waste time, start today and give it everything you’ve got, because you’ve got what it takes.

Finally, there is one other important principle in successfully negotiating a difficult obstacle on a mountain bike. Speed is your friend. In most cases it is much easier to negotiate the difficult section of the route if you do it with speed. The same applies for most things in life. Don’t hesitate, if you have made the commitment, do it with everything you have and the risk of your dreams and goals being devastated becomes infinitely smaller.