Live Your Life and Embrace Your Fear
What scares you? For me it's spiders, and the thought of someone breaking into my house. I can't account for the spiders. The break-in fear I trace straight back to watching way too much Law and Order. And these worries do get in the way. Just yesterday I needed to pull my son's soccer nets out of the shed, and I left them there because of spiders. Silly? Probably, to you. Not to me. My guess is you let your own fears stop you from doing things too.
The familiar ones get a lot of attention: heights, enclosed spaces, animals like spiders, snakes, and rats. Those are the fears that keep someone off a hot air balloon, out of a submarine, away from the shed door. Plenty of other fears have no physical shape at all. Change. Failure. Rejection. They eat at a person and talk them out of taking any chances.
Risk is where the lessons live. Nobody has ever fallen in love without first being willing to get hurt. Nobody has finished school or built a career with a guarantee they wouldn't fail somewhere along the way. People do all of it anyway, every day. Some are stopped cold by fear before they ever reach those ordinary milestones. Others never notice that their own hesitation is quietly steering them. The fear sits in the mind and keeps growth and dreams just out of reach.
Fear itself isn't the enemy, and ignoring it is a mistake. It's a physical response to danger. When the brain senses a threat, it fires off a chain of reactions meant to ready the body to fight or flee: the heart speeds up, breathing quickens, blood pressure climbs. So when a spider crosses my path, my body is reacting to the chance it might be harmful. My mind, though, has done something extra. It has blown the spider up into something it isn't. A creature that spends its life eating insects becomes, in my head, a monster with intentions.
A lot of people are run by monsters like that. The usual culprits behind doing nothing are fear of making mistakes, of the unfamiliar, of change, of past choices, of letting other people down, of looking weak, of a broken heart. These keep a life frozen in place. Relationships don't get started. People stay quiet at work instead of speaking up for themselves. Feelings get hidden away.
Consider how the brain actually works: it grows by learning, and learning means building new connections. You can't build new connections if you never step past what you already know. Maybe you don't picture yourself as a fearful person. But if you're falling short of what you could be, or pulling yourself back from things, something apprehensive is doing the steering.
Start by owning the fear. It's yours. People get frozen by the unknown, and the one thread running through every fear is that the mind made it. Fear is invented. You may have gone through something awful and now dread repeating it, fair enough. Still, there's no way to be certain about a thing that hasn't happened. Growth matters, progress matters, and the work is figuring out which fears are the ones keeping you stuck. That's hard. Some honest self-reflection and a little nerve can get you past it.
First, look at your goals and ask why they're still goals. You might not see the fear directly, but you can name the dreams that aren't arriving. A raise. Finishing a degree. Saying something to a person who hurt you. Then ask why it hasn't happened yet. What's in the way? Why can't you move?
Second, try visualization. Once you've spotted the fear, keep in mind that the bad ending you keep picturing is imagined too. So picture a different one. Write it out in the third person, a short story that lands somewhere better. Sit with a version where things go well.
Third, strip the fear of some of its weight. Fear exists because harm is possible, and expecting a bad outcome is reasonable. Your boss won't hand you a raise just because you spent twenty minutes imagining they would. Failure is going to show up sometimes. What separates fear from acceptance is the willingness to take a chance instead of staying put. So ask the plain question: what's the worst case? You don't get the raise. That stings, and you'll live, and you still have moves, like finding another job or asking what it would take to get promoted. The one certainty is that nothing changes if you never ask.
Fourth, take the chance, then mark it. You may not be ready to walk into your boss's office today. Start smaller. Put yourself in situations that feel a little uncomfortable and let them get less so. Nervous on public transit? Ride the subway. Afraid of getting lost? Drive a road you've never driven. Bit by bit the fear starts to look like what it is, a thought. And when you beat one, give yourself credit. Count the small wins and let yourself imagine how the big one will feel.
Melissa Lavery, M.S.
Reference: Ross, G. (n.d.). These 10 Types of Unnecessary Fear Should not Block You Anymore. Retrieved March 18, 2015.