This week we have blogger, Digital Marketing Consultant, and creator of the "Year of Fear" challenge, Kendra Wright on the show. Kendra has massively improved her happiness and quality of life by facing her fears, and now she wants the same for you.

Many people know Kendra from her inspiring ‘Year of Fear Challenge.’ This challenge was spawned from her realization that many failures and non-starts in her life came from a fear of failure. She figured the best way to get beyond this was to face her fears head-on, and thus the challenge was born!

Amazingly enough, Kendra was so committed she exercised this daily challenge for an entire year! She's now gone on to complete over 700 "comfort zone challenges, and she'd be the first to admit it was well worth it.

The challenge led her to face fears (like heights), do things she had never considered before (like a police ride along), and she's also knocked-off some of those bucket list items that tend to accumulate in everyone’s life (like hot air ballooning). It even led her to change her peer group as she firmly believes in the saying:

“You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with.”

From the outside it might look like such an adventurous and active person must naturally be outgoing, positive and brave. But that's not necessarily true. Kendra admitted that positivity doesn't come naturally and she’s had to develop some enjoyable daily rituals for self-improvement in the area of mindset, including:

Structured sleep – 7 hours per night
Treadmill – 30 minutes first thing in the morning with some motivational videos
Full Lunch break – dedicated decompression time from the work day
Nightly journaling – recording important thoughts/events from the day

Kendra’s a firm believer in living her own life and doesn’t let anybody tell her what she should or shouldn’t do. Even though she believes that you should say “Yes!” to anything you haven’t done before, you should still pick and choose things you think will be fun and add to your life. She still does things that scare her, but there’s got to be some enjoyment for her to do it and she’s not afraid to say “No.”

Speaking of being afraid, facing her fears and living outside of her comfort zones has led to bigger successes in life. Kendra actually left behind a great job to go full-time in her own consulting business, and went sleepless with worry for three weeks because of it. But it’s been the best thing for her, and she credits her yearly challenges to laying the groundwork for her to believe in herself enough to pursue her dreams. She says that people need to wake up to how their fear holds them back:

“Most people don’t realize what they’re able to do, what their real possibility is ‘cause they never swing the bat, they’re always in the dugout. I’d rather swing and miss and at least going for it than sitting in the dugout. You’re never getting on base if you don’t try.”

Kendra wants people to stop comparing themselves to what they see in social media. She says, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are highlight reels; you only see the best things that people want to put out there. We shouldn’t be comparing our uncut life to the awesomely curated highlight reels of others on social media because everyone has their own stuff to wade through.

“It’s going to be messy, but at the end it will be the biggest beautiful mess you’ve ever seen if you just keep going.”

Kendra is a super inspiring person and I count myself lucky to consider her a friend. I'm positive you'll get a kick out of Kendra's views on life and feel inspired to go out and take your own risks!