In the movie Cool Runnings, during the team tryouts, they showed old film footage of crashes to a room full of potential bobsledders and by the end of the screening, the room was empty. In reality, on the first day when they showed the footage there were about forty potential bobsledders and about half turned up the next day for the trials.

The crashes they showed us that day were far worse than anything depicted in the movie. There was blood and mayhem everywhere. There were sleds flying out of the track, crashing into trees. Brakemen flying out of the sled, slamming against the side of the track and then skirting over the edge into the crowd. And of course, the usual crashes where you are trapped between the sled and the walls being pounded as the sled drags you down the track at 80 mph. But the crash that stood out in my mind was the one in which I saw four bodies strewn along the track covered with blood. Three of the guys were unconscious and the driver's head was lying on the ice about 30 feet from his body. I remember sitting there, ashened faced, wondering what I was getting myself into. It's obvious that the other guys didn't turn up because they were fearful. The truth is that there is nothing wrong with being afraid.

There are some healthy fears that serve us well and that we need to have. We need to have a healthy fear when operating around a hot stove and you should definitely have a fear of stepping off the curb in New York City without checking to see if there is a Yellow Cab in your immediate vicinity. However, for the most part, fear is an irrational response to the challenges we face in our lives.

I have often heard it said that FEAR is an acronym which stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. In other words, the fears that we have are baseless. They are a figment of our imagination. We embrace and imprint them on our mental disks and replay them so often that they become the tunes we dance to every time we set out to do something great in our lives.

Many of us are not living up to our full potential because we allow these irrational pieces of evidence that seem so real to cripple us. What fears are influencing and controlling your behavior to the point that they prevent you from living the life of your dreams? What pieces of false evidence are you holding onto, behaving as if they are real? Do not take counsel of your fears for as Rudyard Kipling said, Of all the liars in the world, sometimes our fears are the worst.