Have you ever felt an emotion called Fear? I bet you have. We all do. I am not talking about the fear where reflex action is required. You know what to do if a Bull is running behind you. You know that you must take action otherwise you will soon be hanging on the horns. So what do you do? You run too. This is reflex action. Its natural instinct. But I am more intrigued about psychological form of fear. Fear of unknown. It cripples you. It blurs your mind. It prevents you from taking any clear action. I read somewhere that our life is governed by two emotions — Fear and Desire. If you look at life very closely, you will see that everything you do is predominantly dominated by these two core emotions.
Yes, fear is important at times. It can trigger an action that can lead to a positive outcome. But many times, it handicaps you. Fear can knock at your door in many forms.
Fear of —
- not being good enough.
- failure.
- being judged by other people.
- criticism.
- change.
- discomfort.
- starting something new.
- uncertainty.
- losing something/someone.
- missing out (also called FOMO — google it if you want to read more).
Quite often, psychological fear is a product of an anticipated future event that you think is undesirable. This all happens in the head and can starve your growth as a human being. Most of the time, what you fear, rarely happens in reality. However, sometimes, what you fear may turn out to be true eventually but even then, fear burdens you with anxiety and despair in the meantime. When fear of an undesirable event or situation in future starts affecting your present, fear becomes pathological. This is when it starts affecting you at the cellular level. When your fear of something has absolutely nothing to do with your present reality in any tangible way, its a wasted energy! You must take charge.
So what can you do about it?
You don’t have many choices, do you? In fact, there are only two choices.
- Observe your thought patterns when you are in fear and shine the light of awareness to it. When you are aware of your fear based thought patterns, you have a choice to disidentify and see them in a clear light. See if any action can be taken. If yes, take it. If not, bring yourself into complete harmony with your current situation.
- Stay dormant and get eaten by the negative energy that fear creates.
It might be worthwhile to give some real life examples here.
Example 1
Last year I had to go through a very long, time-consuming and difficult process of redundancies at work. When I first received an email from HR that I may be potentially impacted; the reactive mode got activated and it scared the shit out of me. My wife was also on maternity leave and wasn’t planning to go back to work anytime soon.
My immediate thoughts were:
How am I going to pay mortgage and my bills?
What if I don’t find another job soon?
It is hard to find another job in science (apparently this is true in Australia at the moment).
I might have to sell my beloved car to get some cash!
If I don’t get a science job, I may have to start driving Uber for the time being!
May be I can go renting!
This went on and on. All these thoughts appeared just after reading the first email! Shockingly, I was not just anticipating unwanted future event but I literally made it a reality in my head. When you are in grip of fear, you lose control of your thoughts. It’s not that I was consciously thinking of these thoughts but they just appeared out of my will. I was anxious and worried for next 3 weeks and played the same negative tape repeatedly in my head. At the end of 4 months, after series of emails and an interview later, I survived. My job was safe.
I am still working at the same place a year later!!!
I wasted lot of time worrying about the future that never arrived!
Example 2
Three and half years ago, the idea of blogging came to my mind. I did not know why I wanted to blog and how to blog. At the most primal level, I had this yearning to put down my thoughts on paper. I wanted to create a website completely on my own. I was really excited! At the same time, fear gripped my mind.
My thoughts were:
I don’t know anything about writing, I am not a writer.
I don’t know how to build a website, I don’t have IT/computer background.
People are going to judge, criticize and perhaps laugh at my writing.
I am not good enough.
People won’t be able to relate or find any value in the content.
Pretty depressing, right? If I had succumbed to theses fearful thoughts, I would not have taken any action. But I decided to question these thoughts and turned them around.
Yes, I don’t know anything about writing but I wouldn’t know ever without trying!
Yes, I don’t have a background to build a website but I can easily learn if I put my time and effort into it.
Yes, people will judge, criticize and perhaps laugh but my goal is not to please people. My main aim is to quench my own yearning by putting down thoughts on a while blank canvas. People judge anyway. We all judge. I judge too but I am learning to suspend my judgements as often as possible. There are 7 billion people on the planet and its impossible to please all of them. I told myself that I can’t let fear of being judged stop me from doing what I want to do. Not everyone is going to relate to the content. Its an unrealistic expectation! Besides, writing is more for me than anyone else. I find it fulfilling. I love these following two quotes on fear of being judged by others.
Judgment is but a mirror reflecting the insecurities of the person who’s doing the judging — Joshua Fields Millburn.
Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.— Lao Tzu.
Yes, I may not be a good enough writer but my intention is not to become a good writer but instead, just write.
What if the content resonates with just “one” person on the planet who finds some value in it. That will give me immense satisfaction. We all are learning from each other and co-creating each other. To be able to touch even one soul is a huge success! There is nothing to lose!
So three and half years later, here I am! I faced all those fears, turned them around and came out on the other side. And on the other side of these phantom psychological fears, there is freedom.
This freedom feels bloody good.
The only effective way to deal with fear is to actually deal with it and not resist or run away from it. So if you want to start something new, change a career, change the country, learn new hobbies, anything that you want to do but haven’t been able to do,
Ask yourself —
Why are you not doing what you want to be doing?
What’s stopping you?
Is it just a speculative fear based thought pattern thats predicting a frightening future situation or a real life constraint??
If you have patience to sit with these questions, answers will emerge.
