Using the Fear Factor To Your Advantage
I’ve written and talked a lot about fear in the past month. Fear seems to be permeating every decision I’m in the process of making both personally and professionally. It shows up in sessions with my clients talking about their own fear of change. It makes its way into conversations with friends and colleagues. It’s everywhere. In short, fear is a common experience, and one that affects everything we do.
If you listened in on my October teleseminar, “What Haunts You: Facing the (Not So) Scary Truth About What Keeps You Stuck,” then you know all about my philosophy of fear as just a signal to tell us to make adjustments and move forward. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But putting it into practice can be a challenge. It’s not just about making a decision one time to move through fear. It’s about making a commitment to not allow fear dictate what you do, what you think, and how you live your life.
Let’s break it down a little. Fear is the most basic human emotion. It stems from the earliest humans and their instinct to survive, which means it’s engrained in us – this survival instinct – and part of our DNA. It was born out of the desire to avoid a larger, faster animal eating you as a means to its own survival. When we think our survival is being threatened, we react accordingly:
- Fight: attacking that which threatens our survival.
- Flight: running away from that which threatens our survival.
But survival today means something totally different than it did a million years ago. It is rare that our survival (i.e. life) is truly threatened, but many of us still act in ways as if it were. Today, survival is less about our physical safety and more about our emotional safety. We can feel threatened by things like criticism, judgment, and rejection, which affect our self-esteem and ability to trust ourselves to make good, healthy choices. We might react by:
- Verbally lashing out at someone who says something we perceive as negative (the old “fight” response)
- Ignoring what someone does or says that is critical, pretending like it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t bother us (the old “flight” response)
The more we engage in these types of behaviors, the less energy we have to engage in healthier ones, to focus on what we really want and what really matters to us. As I often say, what we focus on creates our reality.
So what are you willing to focus on? Attack, avoidance, or something more productive? I know it is possible to feel fear and move forward at the same time. I’ve done it. And I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts on this and my own experience. In the meantime, what is YOUR story of feeling fear and moving forward anyway? Please share by leaving a comment below.
Photo: Dinosaur © by InfoMofo
