Boxed in?
It’s easy to live small when you stay in your box of comfort. You can’t try more or do more as long as you don’t allow yourself to expand.
By being confined in a small space for a long period or simply not moving enough, your muscles will atrophy over time which means they’ll essentially shrink and become more or less useless to you. It’s only through movement (you don’t need to run a marathon every day for that though) that you’ll keep them from disappearing.
The same goes for your ability to grow: a little bit of discomfort (or a lot, depending on your tolerance level) can help you learn and grow into a better version of yourself. You need to “move” towards the fears and face them or you’ll get to a point where you can’t do as much as you could before and regret not acting sooner. You never know if an effort to accomplish something could lead you to a greater life.
Nothing great comes easily and it’s not by simply hoping and wishing for something to get better that it will actually do so: at some point, you need to act.
It doesn’t have to be too scary either: you don’t have to coldly get in front of a crowd and have a 20 minutes talk without any preparation to fight your fear of public speaking for example. A small iteration at a time should at least help you towards your goal.
The “1%” more each time is a great way to form a new habit and slowly increase your abilities. A great book on this subject is “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.
Doing a bit more every day and keeping track of the efforts in a journal will help you when you don’t feel like it the next day: you’ll have proofs that you made some progress in the past and so can you today.
So find what you wish to do and are afraid to start or continue, and get yourself something to write your progress in, and let’s break out of those boxes, they’re too small anyway.