Not every time, but a lot of the time, a leap of faith will look really crazy for someone else watching.
How does a leap of faith make you feel?
Uncomfortable, highly confusing, and scary at times, BUT also extremely empowering, inspired, and happy.
If the leap is just enough of a challenge you will learn and grow, and it will become an addiction. You will keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone into what is uncomfortable and even painful at times, so that you can reach the zone of learning and growth. This builds self-esteem, resilience, and alignment within, and so, you are embarking on a positive path of growth and evolution. This is applicable regardless of age or where you are in your achievements. Everybody can take a leap of faith in their own potential. Big or small. You are never done with what you can become.
The key is to find that first step, to make that challenge just about right.
If the leap is too big, too far away from where you are comfortable, chances are that you will get burned. You will perceive yourself as a failure, incompetent, and stupid. The feeling will be too much pain and the emotion will be sadness and anxiety. Stress will then enter your system.
Stress makes it hard to think logically and rationally and it makes it difficult to interpret what you are feeling and what your intuition is trying to tell you. Chances are that you will misjudge jet another leap, and so, you are embarking on a negative spiral within.
How to get back on track, reset yourself and start over?
Start meditating. Mindfulness and meditation are not the same thing. Mindfulness gets you through the day, but meditation offers you deep healing. Meditation de-excites your nervous system. You body, will eventually, relax and stop produce stress hormones. You will, eventually, get back into a state of calm.
When calm, ask yourself high quality questions:
What can I learn from this?
How can I apply my learnings?
This is how you are entering the learning zone. Don't settle until you are receiving high-quality answers. A high-quality answer will never tell you that you are a failure, incompetent or stupid. You might bee –I have been more than once–but that doesn't matter. You don't learn, grow and evolve from answers like that. That is victim mentality and that will get you nowhere.
A high-quality answer will always inspire you to change for the better, to evolve towards harmony within by creating emotions that have a positive psychological effect on your body, such as inspiration, excitement, happiness, joy, curiosity, or a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. The opposite of stress. Your answer, your leap, is doable and achievable in the very now, with what you've got. It probably scares you a bit but inspire you to action at the same time. And remember the golden rule:
A high-quality answer –to what you can learn and how to apply it–will never involve you forcing yourself, or your beliefs, onto others and hurting others by breaching other people's boundaries, integrity, and dignity. That is separation mentality, the very lowest of human consciousness represented in the world today.
A leap of faith will often make you look crazy for the people around you. Take the leap anyway. Since it is faith, it does not make sense to a logical rational mind. Take the leap anyway.
You will change in the eyes of your peers. That can trigger feelings of discomfort and pain in others and emotions like fear and sadness of losing what was once there. Take the leap anyway.
You could be right, you might just be getting it wrong. If your first leap didn't work, change something, and try again. Now, get back up on that horse and take that leap of faith in your own potential. You got this!