Fear can be your friend or foe. It can alert you and advise you of many life lessons, but it can also cloud or limit your life. You face fear every day – fear of failure, fear of rejection. Even the fear of being, yourself. Fears do not have to be walls, but life hurdles that can help propel you to higher levels.
Fear is with us, every day, in little ways. Through pain, injury, embarrassment, failure, or rejection. Fear can have such an inhibiting or even devastating impact on our lives and is often hidden from our conscious awareness. With that said, it can also be your guide and advisor.
Major battles with fear are not outside of you; they look inside, in the center of your psyche shaped as self-doubt, insecurity, lack of confidence, shyness as well as timidity, a reluctance to assert, express, or even “being” yourself.
Whatever form fear takes, your willingness to face it squarely in the eye will determine your fate in the height of your human potential. Whether fear is your friend or foe depends upon whether you become its master or its servant.
The primary way to face your fears is by taking “action“. You cannot control your fear by hoping it will go away. You conquer your fear only by making it your advisor, not allowing it to become your master. If you cannot take your power; the danger is that you may surrender your power without a fight. Do not wait for fear to die, face it while you live.
When you perceive something as dangerous or threatening, chemical messengers like adrenaline and glucose flow into your bloodstream to energize your muscles and ready you to face, fight or flee from danger. Your mouth may become dry, your heart might beat faster, your breathing may become rapid and shallow.
Fear is psychologically uncomfortable. It is supposed to be. It is designed to get your attention. Sometimes, you need to do what is fearful.
You are not actually afraid of the act you fear, rather you fear your own imaginings of what “might“ go wrong. You are afraid of the physical and emotional consequences such as embarrassment, shame, mediocrity, pain or anything you envision as a worst-case scenario.
Expectations tend to shape your experience of life, and fearful expectations create a fearful life. The key to facing your fears, then, is to consciously begin to visualize positive outcomes, to form the pictures you want rather than focus on images or results you fear.
The problem in fear is our “response“ to it. Fear is the cornered animal within us, bearing its teeth, the lowest common denominator of human experience. Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from something we are afraid of and shrink up inside of ourselves in several ways. Nevertheless, let’s appreciate fear for its whispered or shouted warnings. Fear calls to you like an overprotective mother to whom you should always listen to but not always here.
Appreciate fear as a voice of caution, but view it as a wall to scale, a hurdle to leap, a challenge to meet, a call to action. You cannot control your fear, but you “can” control your response to it.
Each of us carries within us a short, or long, list of things we sincerely don’t believe we are very good at. We may be able to justify that list with past examples of what we believe to be true when in actuality it isn’t the truth. If at first, you don’t succeed, keep trying. If success is something you feel so strongly within you, you will find ways to achieve that success. Those who bravely dares must sometimes risk of fall.
There is also great value in experiencing failure, rejection, embarrassment and shame. We develop resilience and discover that the sky doesn’t fall if it happens. Life keeps going on, and if we keep trying, we continue to improve.
You may have discovered that the more fear you feel in the face of a challenge, the greater your sense of elation when you have conquered it. There are few better words in life than when you can say “I did it“. Each time you face your fears by doing whatever it is you want or need to do, you practice every day self-empowerment.
As it turns out, fear is not a wall, but a doorway to opportunity. Not at all the end of the world, only the beginning.
For, courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it!
