It’s always feels vulnerable to make a change in your life—cross a threshold: to open a gluten-free bakery; Date a new person; Let go of your job by choice or by circumstances. The lizard-brain within will focus exclusively on all you can lose, and really, how you will surely die.

But I want you to know how much power and joy you’ll gain by getting your feet muddy in this life. Sure, you may feel more uncertain. But you are heading towards greater possibility.

As a coach, I work with helping people change their lives all the time.

And it’s never the actual situation that grinds them down. It’s the fantasies.

When we’re walking into the unknown, it’s like we’re walking into New York City’s Times Square with a thousand lights, choices, scenarios flashing all at once. In real life, we’ll only have one outcome. But in the fantasies before then, there are hundreds of balls up in the air, and you’re frantically practicing responses to every single one of them.

I don’t know about you, but my mind, in fear, goes to extremes. My fantasies are never in the middle. There is no present moment. No increments. It’s success or failure. I’m either winning a Pulitzer (which I will eventually be discredited for) or facing the apocalypse. And always there is this fat gray sewer rat gnawing at my brain, wanting control of absolutely everything, which as it turns out isn’t possible or desirable if you want an inspired life.

Truth: I have faced even good changes with secret dread. When my second book Inspired & Unstoppable got published, I feared it would bomb and I journaled: “What if it’s like one of those Roman Candles that shoot high into the coal black night sky but doesn’t flare into beauty? What if I just fizzle in mid-air for all to see? And then when I’m homeless, of course, swilling sour red wine, I’ll hear the whispers, some real, some now coming from the voices that I’ve begun to hear, “Guess, she didn’t ‘wildly succeed in her life’s work.’”