Lessons On Overcoming Fear
15 Comments October 15, 2008 / Posted in Personal Development
“Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.”
Swedish proverb
How many times have us let fear breed in our mind and hence leading to inaction. Fear can be helpful for survival when it warn us of the dangers that we are facing and cause us to be more mentally prepared to deal with the problem. It definitely serve us well until it got to a point that it is inhibiting our ability to take actions.
How do we overcome fear? First of all, we need to determine what is the cause of fear.
Fear is basically what you are thinking and portraying it to your brain. Basically it is all about thoughts. How you think about something will make it either scary or not.
Breaking your personal comfort zone is one of the trigger to fear. When you want to quit your current job, you will feel fear. When you are going to give a first speech in your 30 years of life, you will feel fear. When we break out of our comfort zone, where we are entering is an area of unknown and most people hate unknown areas.
The funny thing about fear is sometime things that we worry and fear about doesn’t come true. It is just the accumulating of negative thoughts in our mind that cause it to snowball into a huge issue. This mean that all the time you spent on worrying and fearing for something that most probably not going to happen are actually wasted.
Let me state an example.
Scenario: Giving a speech in an auditorium packed with 1000 people
You are still joking with your friend a moment ago until one of the backstage staff came over to you and inform you that you have 15 minutes more to your speech. Suddenly your brain switch to high gear and start churning out images of you stuttering, tripping and fall, audience don’t laugh to your jokes and you are booed off the stage. Your face suddenly turned pale, you feel the butterflies in your stomach and your palms start to sweat. Fear had conquered you. But will most of the things happen? No. It will maybe happen if you keep thinking of all the negative ideas and start to act them all out.
Can fear be overcome? Yes! Definitely.
Tackling Fear
Let us decipher the word, FEAR
F – False
E – Evidence
A – Appearing
R – Real
Whenever there are time when you feel fearful, remember this and self talk to yourself and decipher the word FEAR.
Be Positive
When negative images start to fill your head. Stop! Control your thoughts and think of positive images. For an example, think of how the crowd cheers for you and the amount of applause you will receive after the end of speech. You can fill in your own positive thoughts for any scenarios.
Nike Just Do It!
I love Nike’s slogan “Just Do It!”. Learn from it and apply it in your life. It can help to crush fear. It is due to inaction and too much thinking that cause you to breed fear in your mind. Whenever you want to do something, don’t allow fear to have the time to breed, just do it!
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
Dale Carnegie
Learning from Fear
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
The quote from Eleanor Roosevelt states that once you look fear in the face and face it bravely, you will learn from the experience and be able to deal with the fear that come next with more confidence and strength. Doing things that you fear will turn it into part of your comfort zone and this this mean that fear is conquered.
One more lesson from a quote.
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
Bertrand Russell
If the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison fear of being eccentric and being laughed at, what will happen to us now? We will be saying good bye to air planes and light bulb. Welcome ferries and candles.
Being Curious
Being curious is the opposite of living in fear. Curiosity empowers you with excitement of venturing into the unknown areas for greater rewards. It spur actions and actions are the seeds to success.
Leave a comment if you got any ideas to share on overcoming fear.
Cheers
Vincent
Self Improvement Blogger
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It’s so easy to stay in your comfort zone, it’s like it’s easier to ignore a neighbour you half know than it is to say hello to them. I consciously force myself out of my comfort zone but it’s a struggle
Fear is an undesired stopper and also a success killer.
Hi Ian,
It is definitely easy to fall into our comfort zone and stay the way as we are. Human are creatures of comfort and habit. Thus that means once we do something consistently, we will be forming a habit. Let say now you start to greet your neighbour consistently and after a month or 2, you will find that instead of being uncomfortable when greeting them, you are getting uncomfortable when you are NOT greeting them instead. How fast human change =) Good Luck Ian.
To Your Success
Vincent
Personal Development Blogger
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Hi Raymond,
I totally agree with your comment. Yet sometimes people know what is harming them yet they are doing it.
Vincent
Personal Development Blogger
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You are absolutely right, that we let fear stop us from doing so much. Although I believe rejection is linked to fear as well. Here is an example i used on my blog.
Say you have no plans for Saturday, so you decide to ask out a girl to a date. She says no and you feel horrible.
Well lets see, you weren’t doing anything in the first place and nothing has really changed now either.
But what if you didn’t ask, you would never know?
What if she did say yes, now that would be a bummer for you
Just do it =)
@Hi Tom,
From your example, even if the girl rejected you, it is just back to square one and you will be lazing around in the house. We got nothing to lose in the first place. It will help us to take action if we can reframe the whole situation into a much encouraging like the above example.
Cheers
Vincent
Personal Development Blogger
Well Vincent, you are right. But people don’t see it that way and expect things to be handed to them.
Guess what, tough, get of your arse and do something.
I guess that is the way to go.
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