Do One Thing That Scares You—Every Single Day

Terry Tucker is a former NCAA athlete, motivational speaker, cancer warrior, and author of Sustainable Excellence. After surviving 13 years of intense cancer treatments, including an amputation, Terry continues to inspire others to reframe fear, embrace discomfort, and live with urgency and purpose. His life is a testament to the truth that real strength begins where comfort ends.

 In this motivational and deeply personal conversation, Terry talks about how the human brain is naturally wired to avoid discomfort—but why growth, healing, and true strength only come when you face what scares you.

Terry shares a daily practice that has helped him build resilience: doing at least one thing every day that makes you uncomfortable, nervous, or scared. This simple habit, he explains, conditions you to be emotionally and mentally prepared for life's inevitable major setbacks—whether it's loss, illness, or unexpected challenges.

Paired with host Kali’s powerful reflection on pushing past personal paradigms, this segment serves as a call to action for anyone feeling stuck, scared, or waiting for "the right time" to be brave.

Key Topics:

• How our brains are wired to seek comfort and avoid pain
• Why daily discomfort builds resilience for life's big challenges
• Fear as a signal to act, not retreat
• How small acts of bravery condition your mind for bigger victories
• The regret of inaction vs. the lessons of boldness
• The importance of living without regret by acting on the dreams that scare you most

Guest Contact & Resources:
📘 Sustainable Excellence: Ten Principles to Leading Your Uncommon and Extraordinary Life
🌐 MotivationalCheck.com

Find out more about Kali and the show HERE: https://humanityoffame.com/

Transcript

0:00

Your belief in that challenges the instinct to avoid suffering. What does taking the first step in embracing pain look like for someone dealing with loss, a life-changing diagnosis, or even amputations? What does embracing pain in those situations look like? Our brains are hardwired to avoid pain and discomfort, you know, and to seek pleasure. So to the brain, the status quo, the way things are right now, hey, it's comfortable, it's familiar, just leave it alone. The problem with that is, and we know this, the only way you're going to grow, the only way you're going to improve, the only way you're going to get better, is if you step outside those comfort zones and do things that make you uncomfortable. Let me recommend, again, something else that I do every day that I would recommend to your audience in terms of dealing with pain, dealing with suffering. Every day of your life, do at least one thing that scares you, that makes you nervous, that makes you uncomfortable, that's potentially embarrassing. It doesn't have to be a big thing. But if you do those small things every day, when the big disasters in life hit us, and they hit all of us, we lose somebody who's close to us, we unexpectedly get let go from our job, we find out we have a chronic or a terminal illness, you will be so much more resilient to handle those things than those people who never step outside their comfort zones and never do anything that challenges them. What you said just brought to mind something I did yesterday, where we have these paradigms, and these paradigms that live in our heads are built on experiences and backgrounds and all these things that we've gone through, and it can hold us back. I wanted to do something yesterday that I felt my paradigm come up, there was a level of fear. I said to myself, it's like, what are you afraid of? Just do it and forget about it. That's what I just did. I just went on ahead and did what I was afraid of, and then just forget about it, and whatever happens, happens. It wasn't forget about it in a careless way, but it was a forget about it in a fearless way. That makes sense. Oh, that's a great way to put it. I may borrow that if you don't mind. I think that's really good. You're right. I always, especially when I get a chance to talk to young people, I always tell them, if there's something in your heart, something in your soul that you believe you're supposed to do, but it scares you, go ahead and do it, because at the end of your life, the things you're going to regret are not going to be the things you did. They're going to be those things you didn't do, and by then it's going to be too late to go back and do them.