Often, we make problems bigger than they really are. Back when I was in university, I had a car I bought for £350, old Kia Pride. It was my pride and joy. Rickety, noisy and slightly embarrassing, but it was mine. I drove it everywhere.

So, when it started making a horrible screeching sound, like metals grinding on metal, my heart sank. I had no more money left to fix it and as long as it still moved, I could not afford to stop driving it either. So, I kept going. For a month. With that nail on chalkboard sound dragging behind me.

Until one day on the way to a club, decked out in my fanciest cloths, I took a wrong turn and ended up driving in front of a long queue of partygoers. It was the most humiliating entrance ever. I decided, it was time to get it fixed. The cost to fix it? £20! I’d tortured myself, and everyone within hearing distance for a month, over something that could have been solved with twenty quid.

And this was not the last time I let fear and assumptions stop me from doing something. Take cycling, I never learnt as a child, and I was too self-conscious as an adult to start. I assumed I’d fall, fail or would be laughed at. I taught my son how to ride a bike, I didn’t so much teach him as bought him a bike, took him to the park and watched him figure it out. A few falls later he was off. Easy. I was envious, of him and families I see cycling together in the park. I wanted that freedom too.  

Then one day, sitting in an hospital waiting room with my son, I got chatting with another parent. Turns out he teaches adults how to ride bikes. I was stunned. Even more so when he told me it was free, paid for by the council as part of healthy living initiative. Free bike lessons? Sign me up.

Except I didn’t. I chickened out again.  Until this year, I made a New Year resolution to learn to ride a bike. Before I could talk myself out of it, I filled out the form hoping no one will reply. But someone did. And on one sunny Saturday afternoon, I had my first lesson. It took just 15 minutes for me to ride a bike. All those years wasted over thinking, solved in a quarter of an hour!