Fear and How to Move Through It

You may remember when you signed up for my ezine being asked a question. I’ve been gathering your responses over the past 6 months (there is a method to my madness!), and I’ve found three large over-arching themes. Over the next three posts, I’m going to be discussing these themes. Today we’ll start with Fear.

Believe it or not, the word “fear” appears in over 40% of the answers I’ve received! Fear of failure, fear of success, and fear of staying in the same place. That’s an awful lot of fear. All of us are aware of what fear does to us. Fear blocks us from doing what we know we can do, and many times what we want to do. It inhibits us. Makes us timid. Clouds our judgment. That’s not a very pleasant list to look at, is it?

So how do we move beyond this thing called fear? The first step is to look at the fear from a distance (dispassionately). By doing this, the fear begins to shrink to its appropriate size. The second step is to express that fear either out loud to yourself, your cat, or another person. That, too, shrinks the fear. Many times just hearing the fear allows us to more effectively deal with it. The third step is to confront the fear, thereby dissolving it.

The most common fear is the fear of failure. If we take this common fear and put it through the above three steps what would it look like? I’ll use myself as an example, ok? (I heard you all breathe a sigh of relief that I didn’t pick you! <wink>)

When I was setting up ChatsOnDemand.com (COD), I thought to myself what if this doesn’t work (fear of failure)? I took a step back from the situation and took another look at what I wanted to do with COD, and instead of looking through fear-based eyes, I looked at it through confident eyes. At that point, I realized my fear had a large ego-component attached to it (it was, after all, MY idea). The other thing I realized was that my fear was irrational – there was no basis for being afraid. So what if I did fail? I would learn something in the process that would help me when I tried again.

The second step was to go to Michael (husband) and Miko (cat) to voice my fear about COD. Would it work? Would anyone use it? Why would they use it? Will it be successful? By asking these questions out loud, I felt the fear diminish a little more, and the questions began to sound more like “how can I make this work” rather than “will this work?” (I want you to know Miko agreed with me on all counts. LOL).

The third step, which was easier after the first two steps, was to look directly at the fear and realize that my fear was nothing more than a normal concern and a “gut-check” to review my objectives and methods. I realized at this point it was the irrational component that was the real block. In realizing this, I found it very easy to now be able to move forward.

The fear of success is as prevalent as the fear of failure. It, too, deserves the three-step treatment. Unfortunately, this is one of the more overlooked fears, as most people think this is counter-intuitive.

The fear of staying in the same place is the other side of the fear of being passed by. In both cases, putting them through the three-step process has the additional benefit of often suggesting the methods and ways to prevent being stuck, i.e., staying in the same place.

In the next ezine, I’ll talk about the theme of being “overwhelmed.”

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Tagged as: Coaching, failure, fear, success