How to Overcome Your Fear: 7 Tips from the Last 2200 Years
by Henrik Edberg - www.positivityblog.com
What is holding you back? Whatever you answer, it will in many cases boil down to fear in some form. Now, fear can be useful to keep yourself alive. But many times, especially if you live a life where you have the possibility to reading these words, fear is just a big obstacle in your path. But what can you do about fear? How can you overcome it? 1. Face your fear to become stronger. You might think to yourself that what you thought was a fear before wasn’t that much to be afraid of at all. Everything is relative. And every triumph, problem, fear and experience becomes bigger or smaller depending to what you compare it to. But to gain a wider perspective of human experience and grow you really have to step up and face your fear. 2. Facing your fear can be surprisingly anticlimactic. “When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson This is perhaps my favorite quote about fear. From a distance and in you mind things may seem very difficult and frightening. But when you actually step up and take action I think many of us have been surprised of how the beard of that bully just comes off. Why? Let’s move on to the next tip… 3. Take action and get busy. As you may have noticed in your own life, 80-90 percent of what we worry about never really comes into reality. Instead things can become anticlimactic when we take action. The beard of the bully comes off surprisingly easy if we just step up and take action. And many times we get the courage we need after we have done what we feared. Not the other way around. 4. Fear is often based on unhelpful interpretation. As humans we like to look for patterns. The problem is just that we often find negative and not so helpful patterns in our lives based on just one or two experiences. Or by misjudging situations. Or through some silly miscommunication. When you get too identified with your thoughts you’ll believe anything they tell you. A more helpful practice may be to not take your thoughts too seriously. A lot of the time they and your memory are pretty inaccurate. 5. Don’t cling to your illusion of safety. “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller Why do people sit on their hands? Is it just because they become paralyzed with fear? I’d say no. Another big reason why people don’t face their fears is because they think they are safe where they are right now. But the truth is what Keller says; safety is mostly a superstition. It is created in your mind to make you feel safe. But there is no safety out there really. It is all uncertain and unknown. As you stop clinging to your safety life also becomes a whole lot more exciting and interesting. You are no longer as confined by an illusion and realize that you set your limits for what you can do and to a large extent create your own freedom in the world. You are no longer building walls to keep yourself safe as those walls wouldn’t protect you anyway. 6. Be curious. When you are stuck in fear you are closed up. You tend to create division in your world and mind. You create barriers between you and other things/people. Curiosity on the other hand is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and enthusiastic then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear. How do you become more curious? One way is to remember how life has become more fun in the past thanks to your curiosity and to remember all the cool things it helped to discover and experience. And then to work at it. Curiosity is a habit. The more curious you are the more curious you become. And over time it becomes more of a natural part of you. 7. Remove separation. Remove fear. The ego wants to divide your world. It wants to create barriers, separation and loves to play the comparison game. The game where people are different compare to you, the game where you are better than someone and worse than someone else. All of that creates fear. Doing the opposite removes fear. But one thought you may want to try for a day is that everyone you meet is your friend. Another one is to see what parts of yourself you can see in someone you meet. And what parts of yourself you can see in him/her. With action, curiousness and understanding we come closer to each other. We gain a greater understanding of ourselves and others. And so it becomes easier to see them in you. And you in them.
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The UnComfort Zone
This Month: The Most Powerful Motivator
I was abruptly awakened and told, “The house is on fire. Go outside!” As I ran out of my bedroom and into the hall my socks slipped on the polished oak floor. A guiding hand helped me keep my footing and a frantic voice urged, “Hurry! Hurry!”As I got to the door I looked over my shoulder and saw flames leaping out of the heating grate on the floor. The door was thrown open and I was shoved outside into the carport. “Go stand in the driveway and wait for me. And, DO NOT come back inside. Do you hear me? DO NOT come back inside the house!”
The door shut and I began to cry. I stood and stared at the seafoam green door with the frosted jalousie windows. I waited and waited, but I did not go stand in the driveway. I couldn’t move. I began to shiver as the cold concrete floor seeped through my socks, and the winter air penetrated my pajamas. It seemed to take forever, and with each passing minute, I cried harder. I could taste the salt of tears flowing down my face and into my mouth.
Finally the door reopened and my mother announced, “The fire is out.” Relief flooded my body as I ran into her arms and she held me tight. I was two years old and the mental images of that day are as clear as if it happened yesterday. It is perhaps my oldest memory.
As an advertising and marketing consultant, I know there are many things that motivate us. During my presentations I frequently conduct straw polls, where I ask my audiences what motivates them. The first answers are usually about desires, but eventually someone remembers the most powerful motivator of all. FEAR.
Fear is a primal instinct that served us as cave dwellers and today. It keeps us alive, because if we survive a bad experience, we never forget how to avoid it in the future. Our most vivid memories are born in Fear. Adrenaline etches them into our brains.
Nothing makes us more uncomfortable than fear. And, we have so many: fear of pain, disease, injury, failure, not being accepted, missing an opportunity, and being scammed to name a few. Fear invokes the flight or fight syndrome; and our first reaction is always to flee back to our comfort zone. If we don’t know the way back, we are likely to follow whoever shows us a path.
Marketers use fear as a motivator as often as they can. They present a scenario they hope will invoke our sense of fear. Then they show us a solution -– a path back to our comfort zone -– that entails using their product or service. Fear is used to sell virtually everything: cars, tires, and life insurance are classics. But, clever marketers also use it to sell breakfast cereal and deodorant. As a result we purchase all sorts of things that a generation ago were considered unnecessary: antibacterial soap, alarm systems, vitamins... the list goes on and on.
WARNING: Fear can be too powerful to use as a motivator because it can also paralyze - the classic deer in the headlights syndrome. Would you like to use fear to motivate your employees to perform better? “If you don’t sell more widgets -- you’re FIRED!” It can work, but there are rules you must follow for it to be successful. To use fear successfully as a motivator, a solution must be offered with it. A new path to follow. You can tell an employee he or she must sell more, but unless you show them how, fear will cause flight or worse: paralysis.
Fear is a powerful motivator, but it is a negative one. I prefer to motivate someone by eliminating doubt. Doubt destroys motivation. If you can help a person get rid of it, you will motivate them positively. I will elaborate on this next time.
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In future articles we'll examine further the ways in which motivation works. How to motivate ourselves, our employees, customers, volunteers, friends, loved ones and children. I would like to get your feedback on which of these areas of motivation are of most interest to you. I’d also like to hear your stories of how you may have overcome adversity and what pushed you to go the distance. Please email me your suggestions and stories.
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Links to previous UnComfort Zone articles:
What's Pushing Your Buttons?
Don't Get Stuck in Reverse
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Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. is a motivational speaker and humorist. He works with companies that want to be more competitive and with people who want to think like innovators. For more information on Robert's programs please visit www.jumpstartyourmeeting.com.