If you didn’t have anything to lose and had everything to gain, how would you live?

Would you play the biggest game you could in life?

Would you spend your time in a such a way that you knew it would create something never seen before?

Would you love in such a way that would change the hearts and minds of those around you?

Could you step into the mindset of being able to do anything?

Would you chase your dreams?

Would you speak the words that have always been ready to come out of your soul?

Would you write in a way that you knew could send vibrations around the world?

I would say so.

Oh how your hands and heart can tremble, but how exciting it is. It’s the most enlivening thing in the world to risk. Who really knows what could happen? Could you fall? Yes. But what if it became the greatest adventure of your life? What if everything you’ve ever asked for and dreamed of was right on the other side of a decision you are being called to make? What if you knew that everything you’ve ever been seeking is also seeking you…and you just had to say yes to the possibilities? It would all be worth it wouldn’t it? This life…it can be a journey into the unknown if you let it…and there’s so many treasures in store for you. So many surprises. So many achievements. So much love. ⛵️ 

It’s great risk that makes us so alive. The same thing that scares us to death at times is exactly the thing that we need to do in order to grow. Because if you’re comfortable, you’re not growing. It’s only when you start to panic a little bit, you start to stress out, you start to doubt and wonder about the things that are going on in your life that you really know you’re stepping into new ground.

The stress and pressure is an indicator that you are doing something right.

They are there to teach you. But not many of us look at negative emotions as oracles for our life do we? Instead, we try to run from them as fast as possible or stuff them down to not deal with them at all. That doesn’t really work in the long run though because those emotions end up manifesting themselves in all sorts of weird ways – sometimes physical, most of the time mental and emotional – and bubble back up when you start to feel the pressure cracks again.

For the longest time I was scared to go into the dark, to do the shadow work – that place where the pain lives – because I was afraid that if I went there I would never be able to get out. However, as I was challenged to go there with the story of The War Painter I started to develop relationships with these negative emotions. Trust me, I could tell you more about anxiety and paralyzing fear than you could imagine. These emotions, amongst others, I started to see as oracles. As I learned how to paint and create life from these emotions I understood that everything we make in this world doesn’t always have to be coming from a positive place. Yes,  creating positive things from positive places is a great thing to do. But what I’m talking about here is being able to take the worst of the worst, let it pass through you, to feel it deeply and connect with it emotionally, and create something beautiful with that.

This has had a major impact on the way I write these days.

Because honestly, there are days where I sit down to write where I am being completely overwhelmed by something that has surfaced or an event that has just happened in my life. It takes me a long time to process things that are going on, but that deficiency that showed itself in school actually turned out to be one of my greatest strengths – because I spend more time with things that most people so I understand exactly what it means to me. Throw in the fact that I am deeply connected with the emotions that run through my life and I’m able to create something out of all that life has to offer me. Good events. Bad events. The past. The future. All of it.

As I connected more with The War Painter and saw that I could express things in a different and creative way, I found myself falling into using my other channels in more creative ways to say what I needed to say. I will blog here, I will speak into the microphone in a different way, I will post something to Instagram that adds to the story, and the list of things that I’m involved in goes on and on. They aren’t disconnected though…they are all intertwined and work together as one story – the story of my life during that day.

Something that has been absolutely throwing me for a loop in the best way possible is going back and recording all of the posts from the beginning of this project. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but getting 50 posts into it today and hearing everything again has struck me. I can’t believe that it has been 5 years. But what’s striking me more than anything else is that I am learning from what I’ve written. To me, that’s actually a good sign…that I can keep my mind open enough to hear these lessons again and let them sink in. While there are things that I actually disagree with now being where I am at 5 years later…I still resonate deeply with a lot of the things that were said.

That man who started this project 5 years took a deep breath and went for it.

I can tell you for a fact that I didn’t see any of this being possible. I didn’t see what is going on now happening. A million plus views later, 100,000 plus fans and the launching of a business…and being right on the cusp of making an incredible dent in the world. I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t know that was a possibility for me all those years ago.

But isn’t that the point?

You take a risk in life and you go for it and you end up being set on a path that reveals itself to you as time goes on.

So what are you going to do? Play it safe or really go for it? It could be the greatest adventure you’ve ever been on if you decide to face that fear and do it anyway. That takes some guts. But the result…greater than anything you could imagine.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project