Fear into Power
Fear. It can be your greatest ally. It warns you of danger, reminds you of your limits and protects you from carelessness. Without it, you may not have survived up until now. But fear can also be your worst enemy. Those who find themselves in the grip of fear avoid taking risks that would lead to greater happiness and some avoid daily tasks such as leaving the house or talking to strangers (which is not a good way to make friends). For others, their career is at a standstill, their personal relationships suffer and the well-being that we each deserve is a distant dream.
We have all known fear. It is one of the most basic of human emotions. And yet, it exists for one purpose: to be conquered.
Fear doesn’t have to run your life. Fear, the most honest of all emotions, wants to be subdued. It beckons us to overcome it. It is an opportunity for growth, the chance to overcome your personal limits and enrich your life. When you stand up to your fears and work to overcome them, you access your own personal power which causes a ripple effect that spreads to other areas of your life. Just by taking one little step, you realize that if you can conquer your fear, you can do anything. Fear is a signal that something new and better is waiting for you; it’s up to you to heed the message. As Mark Twain once said, “Courage is resistance to and mastery of fear — not the absence of fear.”
Those who seem fearless in the face of risk, who go for what they want, who let nothing stop them, have fears like the rest of us. But they see their fear as something to be conquered. That feeling is a signal to muster up the courage and strength from within and take action. They know that the feeling of triumphing over fear is far more pleasant than shrinking back from it.
Fear is a learned response. We are not born with a fear of flying, fear of water and fear of failure. Fear functions like anything else that we learn; the more we repeat it, the more ingrained it becomes, and the harder it is to change. It becomes an unconscious program that we run again and again, and we get better at it with each go. It becomes an automatic response. Then, each time it is triggered, we are swept away by overwhelming emotions and there is little that we can do. Yet if fear is a learned response, it can be unlearned. The key to overcoming fear is to reprogram the brain to respond differently to the same stimuli.
When I work with clients to free them of fear as rapidly as possible, I encounter two different types of fear. The first type of fear is caused by envisioning frightening scenarios that have not happened and probably will not happen. This type of fear is not a response to external events or stimuli, but rather, it is a response to fear-provoking thoughts – images and internal dialogue – that are often out of conscious awareness. The brain does not know the difference between reality and a vividly imagined experience, so if we imagine vivid unpleasant experiences, the body responds with fear. Of course, although the trigger is imagined, the fear is very real, as anyone who lives with constant fear can tell you. In this case, we work to undo the unconscious programming that is running the same loop again and again. With many clients, the fear response can actually disappear in one session.
The second type of fear is a bit different, and is known as a phobia. A phobia is not caused by envisioning frightening scenarios, but instead, is the result of what is known as “one-trial learning.” A phobia is almost always based on a traumatic experience in the past, one event, which was so frightening, the response of fear has been linked to a certain stimulus, be it flying, water, heights or any number of other things. This traumatic event can be “re-encoded” so that it remains as a memory, but loses its emotional charge. When this is done, a process that literally takes minutes, the phobia disappears.
If you have a fear or phobia and don’t feel that you could possibly overcome it, take a moment to ask yourself this question: “What would life be like if my fear disappeared?” Do that before reading on.
Asking yourself this question takes you out of fear and into considering its opposite. You begin to access the state you want to achieve, which loosens up the grip of your fear. To overcome fear you must commit to making it happen by deciding that if it is possible for others, it is possible for you.
Like all emotions, fear eventually vanishes, and that is just what fear fears most; its own end. It calls to you to keep it alive, but nothing lasts forever. Will you succumb to your fear or will you transform your fear into power?
