“Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.”
~Karl Augustus Menninger~
“The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”
~Mahatma Gandhi~
1. Face your fear to become stronger.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt~
If you have to handle a big fear, whatever it may be, and later realise you actually survived it, many things in life you may have feared previously seems to shrink. Those fears become smaller. They might even disappear.
2. Facing your fear can be surprisingly anticlimactic.
From a distance and in you mind things may seem very difficult and frightening. But when you actually step up and take action I think many of us have been surprised of how the beard of that bully just comes off.
3. Take action and get busy.
You can’t sit around think and waiting for courage and confidence to come knocking on the door. If you do, you may just experience the opposite effect. The more you think, the more fear you build within.
As you may have noticed in your own life, 80-90 percent of what we worry about never really comes into reality. Instead things can become anticlimactic when we take action. The beard of the bully comes off surprisingly easy if we just step up and take action.
And many times we get the courage we need after we have done what we feared. Not the other way around.
4. Fear is often based on unhelpful interpretation.
As humans we like to look for patterns. The problem is just that we often find negative and not so helpful patterns in our lives based on just one or two experiences. Or by misjudging situations. Or through some silly miscommunication.
5. Don’t cling to your illusion of safety.
Why do people sit on their hands? Is it just because they become paralyzed with fear? I’d say no. Another big reason why people don’t face their fears is because they think they are safe where they are right now. But the truth is what Keller says; safety is mostly a superstition. It is created in your mind to make you feel safe. But there is no safety out there really. It is all uncertain and unknown
You may get laid off. Someone may break up with you and leave. Illness will probably strike. Death will certainly strike in your surroundings and at some point come to visit you too. Who knows what will happen?
6. Be curious
When you are stuck in fear you are closed up. You tend to create division in your world and mind. You create barriers between you and other things/people.
The emotions you experience are often as a result of what you focus your mind on. Change what you focus on about something and you can change your emotions about that thing.
7. Remove separation. Remove fear.
The ego wants to divide your world. It wants to create barriers, separation and loves to play the comparison game. The game where people are different compare to you, the game where you are better than someone and worse than someone else. All of that creates fear. Doing the opposite removes fear.
That there is no real separation between beings, that we are one and the same, might sound a bit corny.
But one thought you may want to try for a day is that everyone you meet is your friend.
Another one is to see what parts of yourself you can see in someone you meet. And what parts of yourself you can see in him/her.
There is often an underlying frame of mind in interactions. Either it asks us how we are different to this person. Or how we are the same as this person. The first frame is based in how the ego likes to judge people and create separation to strengthen itself (either through feeling better or more like a victim). The second one creates warmth, an openness and curiosity within. There is no place to focus on fear or judgement anymore.
This is of course not easy, especially if you have held the first frame of mind for many years. But you can get insight into this by doing the rest of the things above. As you face your fears the barriers and separation you have built in your mind decreases. You come closer and feel more of a connection to other people.
With action, curiousness and understanding we come closer to each other. We gain a greater understanding of ourselves and others. And so it becomes easier to see them in you. And you in them.
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