What's at the root of my fear of commitment?

I suppose I've always thought of commitment as something that will restrict me, trap me. I'll preach to others that 'commitment provides the boundaries within which we experience freedom...blah blah blah' but when it comes down to it I resist it with the best of them.

So having sworn I would get to the root of this resistance I plunged into the shadows where the source of all my resistance lurks and took a look around to see what I could find.

There was a lot to wade through - one thing led to another. I peeled away the layers to discover a web of fears that I had wrapped up with commitment - at the centre of it all was a fear of failure.

I hate to fail - it makes me feel completely hopeless - I go straight into a spiral of 'I'm not good enough, I can't do it, what's the point, life is crap, I'm rubbish, I hate being me...' - not to mention the bruised pride of having been so hopeful and believing in something only to then fall flat on my face.

As I was going through all this in my head I suddenly thought, but hang on, all failure actually is is committing to something and it not working out the way I had wanted it to. So what? If I enjoyed the journey it took working towards the goal then does it actually matter in the end if the goal is achieved? And there it was - the crucial key:

The journey is every bit as important, if not more so than the destination - regardless of whether I achieve what I set out to achieve if I can say 'I did my best, I enjoyed the ride and I learnt a lot along the way' then surely that is what really matters.

In this light commitment suddenly appears as a means to create a path, a journey, and not a measure by which I'll be deemed a failure or success.

What I hadn't seen was that I have become totally goal-orientated in much of what I do. My happiness and contentment has been dependent on specific outcomes being achieved - I've been allowing my happiness to be dictated by circumstance.

Now, having got to the core of my fear and shattering the ridiculous foundations upon which it was built there is a whole new freedom to my career planning...

I'm going to have fun this year, no holding back, this is a year for creativity and risk taking - I'll take all sorts of ideas and run with them, some of them will work and some of them won't but as long as I'm having a good time and doing my best in the process, who cares?