Do you have a fear you want to get rid of?
Start by understanding this…
Fear is a product of your mind. And since it’s a mental process, you can use your mind to stop it and live a more satisfying life.
Now, if you have a phobia—a fear that can be incapacitating when you’re in certain situations, you will likely require some sort of professional help to work through it.
However, if you’re like most of us, you don’t have that kind of debilitating fear. Instead, you wrestle with more trivial versions of fear that just keep you from living the way you really want.
If you just listen to people talk, you’ll hear all kinds of fears coming out. Fear of losing, fear of talking to people, fear of looking bad or foolish, fear of making a phone call, fear of starting a business… you name it.
To spend your life living in fear and never fully exploring your dreams is a terrible way to live.
Whether a fear originates from previous bad experiences or the unknown, remember it’s not the circumstance that’s making you anxious. It’s a mental process that is causing worry and doubt to rise within you. A process you can reverse with a little understanding.
Here are a few techniques you can use to overcome a fearful situation:
Face the Thing or Person You Fear
When you back away from a fear-inducing situation or person, your fear grows larger and larger until you deal with it. It can get to the point that it dominates your thinking and feeling during the day, and often keeps you awake at night.
However, if you face the fear, it will leave you. Your ability to confront and act despite your fears is the key to your mental freedom. It makes you happier and allows you to become more successful.
Here’s a good exercise to help you face your fears.
Identify a situation or person in your life that you are afraid of and resolve to deal with that fear immediately. Don’t allow it to control you or make you unhappy for another day.
When you decide to face any fear-inducing situation, you automatically grow—your self-esteem increases, your confidence goes up, and you become more courageous.
Don’t Try to Figure Out the “How”
The next time you have a goal that scares you, refuse to try to figure out how you’re going to accomplish it. That will just create more worry, doubt and anxiety.
To avoid feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed when you want to pursue a goal that excites you, complete the following three practices:
1. Take a moment to recognize that you have introduced a new idea that doesn’t yet mix with the old notion you have of yourself, and this is what’s causing your discomfort.
2. Be aware that the old notion (your paradigm) doesn’t want you to change. It wants you to stay what, where and how you are.
Rather than give in to your paradigm, keep impressing the new idea (using things like affirmations, a goal card and visualization) on the subconscious mind with gratitude and faith.
3. When you receive guidance on what your first step should be, take it. Then, stay alert for further cues and keep moving forward, pushing into the unknown territory that you have fallen in love with.
Act “As If”
This is a powerful process where you walk, talk, carry yourself, and, most importantly, feel exactly as you would if you were utterly unafraid in a particular situation.
Build an image of who you want to be in the situation, then, act like the person you want to become. You’ll find that you stand up straight, smile, move quickly and confidently, and, in every respect, act as if you already had the courage that you desire.
Be Grateful
Gratitude is one of the most powerful emotions you can have. So powerful, in fact, that there’s no room for fear, worry or doubt inside a grateful mind.
So, the next time you feel fearful, think about several things you are grateful for and really feel the gratitude. I know that’s a tall order, but if you do it, everything will start to shift in an instant.
You Can Do It
If you did some research as to why so few people develop their potential and move to progressively higher levels of achievement, you would trace it to one thing—fear.
The fear, doubt and worry that a person experiences when they step out of their comfort zone causes them to retreat to what they perceive as safety. When, in truth, it is the most dangerous place a person could live because there is no growth there.
And where there is no growth, there is disintegration. Nothing ever stays the same. We’re either moving forward and towards something bigger and better, or we’re going in the opposite direction.
To grow, we must do the thing we think we cannot do. We must look our fear in the face and walk right through it. Otherwise, we allow fear to sabotage our success.
Make up your mind that fear is not going to stop you from doing the thing that you want to do. You are far more powerful and resilient than you think. Step out and do it today.
To more and better,
Sandy Gallagher
