After a lifelong battle, musician Alvin Slaughter overcame his fears by confronting his own faulty thinking. Here’s how you can do the same.

By the time I was 34 years old, I had seriously messed up my life. I had failed at most of my 16 jobs, fathered two children out of wedlock, was evicted from two apartments and suffered foreclosure on my mortgage. My financial problems led to two declared bankruptcies and an inevitable crisis in my marriage. I had lost a lot.

If you consider closely my ongoing dilemmas in life, you’ll observe a pattern. The problem was not that God wasn’t big enough or that He’d forgotten me. Neither could I blame the devil or other people for everything wrong in my life. Though the devil and people are sometimes factors that need to be addressed, in this case it was my faulty life pattern I had to ultimately face. In short, I had to face the music.

As a professional singer, the phrase “facing the music” intrigued me. Simply put, it means “to accept responsibility for what you have done.” It means owning up to poor choices and patterns of living. For me, it meant admitting that for more than 20 years, my life had been completely gripped by fear. Fears of failure, rejection, my own weakness and not knowing how to confront life’s challenges plagued me continually. They affected every area of my life and kept me from success.