Who's Afraid?

Have you noticed that everywhere you turn there are motivational posters, social media posts, inspirational sayings about being fearless?

I call bullshit on it all.

There is no ONE person on this planet who is fearless.

And I don't think that's the goal. Fear is important. Fear is necessary. Fear keeps us safe, it keeps us from doing stupid things.

But it also keeps us from doing things that we need to do to have the life that we truly want.

And it’s not our fault.

We aren’t weak because there is a fear in us that is holding us back. There is a legitimate reason that our body reacts in a certain way when we are ready to make a big step, to try something new, to take a big risk.

• Maybe we were hurt in the past.
• Maybe we saw someone else get hurt.
• Maybe there is generational trauma that is impacting us.

The first thing I want you to know is that any fear you might have is valid. And there is nothing wrong with you if you have fear. You are normal, you are like every single other person out there.

The second thing I want you to understand is that your fear doesn’t need to hold you back. You can move forward even though you are scared. Even though it feels like you will never get past your fears.

Because it’s not about getting ‘past your fears’. It’s about understanding your fears. It’s about knowing where they came from, why they exist, and what they are trying to tell you.

It’s about realizing that past traumas do not necessarily mean future traumas, particularly when you are a stronger, wiser, more experienced person.

One of my favourite exercises is to write down my fear around something and think about where that fear came from. And then I clearly write out two things about that fear: how likely is it to actually happen and, if it did happen, would it really be so bad?

For example, whenever I take a financial risk, my fear was always that I would lose my house and my family would become homeless. So, putting my two questions to the test I’d ask myself - how likely is it that I’m going to lose my house and would it really be that bad if I lost my house?

My answers:

First, pretty damn unlikely. I’m pretty risk averse, so I'd never take such huge financial risks that my house would be on the line. My house is fine, my family is fine.

Second, how bad would it really be to lose this house? To be honest, I feel ready to leave the city we live in. The cost of living here is high, winters are hard, and, after 20+ years in the same city, I’m ready for a new adventure. Being tied to this mortgage kind of weighs me down, so the worst case scenario of losing this house isn’t so bad.

Huh, all of a sudden, my fear disappears because what I feared most has no power over me any longer.

Try it out - you might find that your fears don’t have quite the power over you that you thought they might.