The Shift That Changed Everything For Me

When I was 5 years old, I had to have surgery for a ruptured hernia. It was my first time experiencing surgery, and I’m sure you can imagine how intimidating that can be for a 5 year old.

I remember the bright lights and feeling afraid. I remember the nauseating smell of the anesthetic gas. And I remember my mom saying she’d be there when I woke up. 

Only, she wasn’t. 

They must not have given me enough anesthesia, because I woke up earlier than I was supposed to. You should’ve seen the look on the nurse’s face when he saw my eyes pop open!

In a rush to get help, he pushed my bed into the empty hallway and then disappeared.

I laid there, alone, scared and unable to speak for what seemed like an hour. Eventually my mom showed up and comforted me, but from that day on I developed a pretty bad speech impediment - a stutter.

This stutter has been with me ever since. To this day it’s actually hard for me to even say the word stutter. 

This stutter was a challenge that I didn’t ask for, but have had to overcome my entire life. It changed my outward expressions. It tanked my confidence.

It injected fear into almost every decision I made as a child and young adult.

I felt like a loser. I looked normal, but I couldn’t talk normally like everyone else. 

The moment I opened my mouth, I could see people wondering what was wrong with me.

Fear and quitting dominated my life. I conditioned myself to quit when anything got hard. 

I was afraid as a kid during recess. I was afraid to talk to girls. I was afraid to attempt anything remotely challenging, because of what I believed about myself.

For me, my breakthrough moment didn’t come until my freshman year of college. As part of my business degree, it was required that I take a speech class. 

I tried desperately to get the professor to allow me to deliver my speech privately, after all, my highschool teachers all allowed me to do that. And besides, I wasn’t as capable as everyone else - right?

Thank God my professor said no.

She told me that even with my speech impediment, it was extremely important that I be able to deliver a presentation in front of an audience.

I actually agreed. She kind of burned the boats for me; I had no other option. I had to face my fear. It was time.

So I wrote my speech out on 3x5 index cards and memorized the whole thing. I was as prepared as I could possibly be.Then the big day came, and I was amped up. I was ready to slay the dragon. I was ready to stop letting fear dominate my life. 

When it was my turn, I stepped up to the podium and…

Nothing.

Nothing came out.

I could not get my mouth to work. My muscles tightened. My face contorted. I started to sweat.

Still nothing.

In a moment of desperation, I looked up from my cards to the rest of the class, and the moment my eyes met theirs, they all looked down. 

Ugh.

I could feel their pity. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing worse than feeling pitied. 

All of my worst fears were coming to life. The very thing I had been so afraid of was actually happening in slow motion. 

I was up there for about 10 minutes before I felt the professor’s hand on my shoulder, as she guided me back to my seat. 

The rest of that class is a blur. I just remember feeling like an abject failure. I was a loser, and everyone knew it.

After class I jumped in my car to drive home, feeling the lowest I had ever felt, when something magical happened.

I turned the radio on and there was a song playing with words that hit me like a ton of bricks.

“You can’t keep a good man down, you can’t keep a good man down”

And let me tell you, it was like God shot a bolt of lightning through my car and into my heart. I was instantly overcome with a new emotion - a deep sense of gratitude for my life and for what had just happened.I thought “Wait…that’s it!? That was the one big fear that I’ve spent years running from? That’s the worst thing I could imagine happening to me, and that’s all there is to it?”

My worst fears had come to life, and I survived. I was still standing. Still here. It didn’t destroy me. 

After a few seconds of this new feeling, I started thinking about everything beautiful in my life. I had a girlfriend (now wife!) who loved me. I had a family that supported me. I had a house to live in and food to eat. I had a car to drive, and it was a pretty cool car (a 1984 Camaro Z28 with T-Tops!).

That moment was like a rebirth. Like I had walked through the jaws of death and survived. 

I was struck with an immense gratitude and desire to find the beauty in everything around me. 

I wish I could tell you that from that moment on that my speech dramatically improved. It didn’t.

I still deal with my stutter to this day, and some days are better than others. The difference is that I no longer allow fear to hold me back. 

That was the day I quit quitting. 

It was the day I discovered what’s waiting for me on the other side of fear:

Freedom.

Fear will always be there in some form. If you’re trying to accomplish anything meaningful or difficult in this world, fear will be right there with you. You’re probably not going to eliminate it. But what you’ll find is that if you push through fear, harness it, and use its energy to propel you forward, you will find immense freedom waiting on the other side.

So what fears are you allowing to keep you stuck? What is it that’s holding you back from pursuing what you know you were born to pursue? 

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