As we approach the start of a new year, there is no doubt in my mind that many of us are looking to make new commitments and resolutions. Many of us have already begun writing out our plans, hopes, and dreams for the new year as we attempt to focus on what is ahead. However, there is often a singular emotion that works against all of us and that is the emotion of fear! Over the next 4 post, I am going to give you some tools to not only face your fears, but also overcome them so that you can move forward in what it is your are supposed to do.
I can not count the number of times that I have been afraid. To take this a step further, I can not even count the number of things that I have been afraid of. The list is so numerous on both of these fronts that this entire post could be consumed with stories of fear upon fear and failure upon failure, but I actually want to help you do something about your fears. Let me be clear, I am not going to show you how to ignore them, I am not going to give you some magic formula to take away the things that cause them, but instead, I want to show you how to bring solutions to those things that cause you to fear. In other words, I would like to show you how to handle the very things that trigger your fears and view them through a fresh set of lenses. There are no pills involved, and this is not something that is going to work like magic where you go through a set of steps and the fear vanishes. No, you are going to have to make a commitment to work at this. Fear, for many of us has not only locked itself into our lives, it has also barricaded the door. Once we learn how to evict fear from our lives, we will also have to repair the damage that fear has caused, and put the necessary safeguards in place to insure that fear has no further access to us.
Now, before I move forward, I know some of you are currently saying that fear can be good. I have read a lot of material on how "great" our fears are, and instead of despising them, or working to eradicate them that we should use those fears to our advantage. I do not want to discount the truth that sometimes fear is our built in security alarm to the presence of a real danger and that by listening to those fears, we can keep ourselves out of this danger, but that is not the perspective that I am coming from. Now, if this work was being written from simply a psychological perspective, then we could talk about embracing your fears and allowing those fears to fuel your passions and motivate you to do more, but I am speaking of the terror and dread that literally stagnates us from doing the very things that we should be doing. I am talking about the type of fear that holds you back when you should be going forward. This is the type of fear that we want to eliminate from out lives. I do not want us to embrace that fear, but I want you to remove that fear.
Here is the truth of the matter, all of us, at some point in our lives have experienced fear about something. We have found ourselves in a place where we are confronted with circumstances or emotions that give us a negative feeling that makes us want to quit. During these times of fear, we have some choices. We can power through these emotions and continue forward with whatever our current pursuit was (this is often what our ideal self says we will do prior to being in the position of fear), we can allow the fear to paralyze us (this is the moment where we stand at the front door of our circumstance, but we lack the courage to go in), or lastly we can allow fear to turn us around (this is the decision to do more than just stand still, but to literally reverse our course and go in another direction). Each of these decisions can be both good and bad, and these are the 3 things that we are going to dissect over this blog series.
So, where do we start? I want you to get out a sheet of paper and begin this journey with honesty. On this paper, I need you to divide it into the 3 columns below and fill in as much as you can. We are clarifying our target are preparing a plan of attack.
List Format:
1. What am I afraid of
2. When did this fear start
3. What currently triggers this fear
This will only work if you tell the truth! You are not required to share this list with anyone but yourself, but one thing is for certain, there is no victory without truth, so put everything on the page! Once you have completed this exercise, you will be prepared for the next step which I will outline in my next post!