While a lot can be said about Muhammad Ali, both good and bad, one thing he doesn’t seem to have wrestled with in life is the fear of being inadequate. Or maybe, just maybe, he did battle with deep feelings of inadequacy, and the loud-mouthed bravado was just a vain attempt to convince himself that he was, in fact, more than adequate. Out of all the fears that we encounter in our lives, I think that the fear of being inadequate, which is closely related to the fear of failure, is perhaps the most frequent. On a daily basis we are provided with countless opportunities to feel incapable, ill-equipped, inadequate to perform the task before us. It happens in class, on the sports field, in our place of work, in our homes, and in our churches. We feel inadequate to serve as a prefect, we feel inadequate to play goal attack, we feel inadequate to deliver a sales pitch, we feel inadequate to be a good spouse, we feel inadequate in raising our children, and we feel inadequate in teaching Sunday school, singing on stage, or preaching a sermon. In all honesty, there are times we just want to shut our eyes and ears to the world because it is constantly revealing and incessantly screaming that we are just not good enough, that we are inadequate. We generally feel inadequate because of three common mistakes and three contributing factors. We'll look at these on Sunday morning, as well as how to combat this fear.