Fear !!!

Fear. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of failing, of not being good enough? Everyone has fears and often they wish they could overcome them. Is that what you want?

Do you want to overcome your fears, overpower them, incapacitate them, disable, kill, knock out, surmount, conquer, defeat, trounce, prevail over, triumph over them?

All these are combative words … I win/you lose words … and they all require a massive amount of energy from you! It’s like you make war on fear! Sounds like the Bush presidents making war on terror … and that only seems to have strengthened the terrorists as well as costing a lot in lives, money, stress, angst … and yet more fear!

Ooops! Did we get something wrong there?

Letting fear rule your life is like locking yourself in a prison cell. You can’t see any way out and it feels like a life sentence. And making war on fear seems to make that a dead cert!

Is there another way? Yes, there is.

How would you feel about making friends with fear?

Eh?! What?! But isn’t fear my enemy? Trying to do me down? Stop me? Hold me back?

Erm … actually …no!

Fear is an instinctual emotion that’s built into us, hard-wired, by Mother Nature for a damned good reason. Fear stops us … and (believe it or not) there are times when being stopped is a life-saving thing. Far from wrecking your life it actually saves you!

Take this … you want to cross a road but something inside (fear) says Don’t! in flashing neon and five million decibels. Next minute a car comes careering out down the road and would have wiped you out.

Yeah, but that just an accident, a coincidence. And it’s not like being afraid of failing, or of not being good enough, not like what I face at work.

Isn’t it? Hmm … let’s think about that.

Likely the traffic-thing comes from what Mum said about crossing the road, about an occasion when it nearly happened to you, about hearing how it did happen to someone. There’s a deep underlying and experiential cause behind it.

Likely there’s a similar deep cause behind your fear of failing, of not being good enough, of being an imposter. There’s something, way back that you don’t remember, that began that innate wariness in you, that tells you to beware, be careful, in certain conditions. You find yourself in a particular situation and that old fear rises up and threatens to make you run.

Somewhere, in that new situation, there’s a trigger that sets up that fight/flight response in you, and it’s now neatly hidden in a closet somewhere in your consciousness where you can’t see it. Probably, your front-brain has got wired over the years to react with the fear as soon as it even smells the possibility of that old situation happening again.

So what can you do?

Well, the overcome fear answer often involves some form of battling, or else you pour a ton of concrete on top so it can’t ever get out, or other variations on that theme.

The making friends with fear answer is just that. But it usually involves even more fear of what might happen if you do that, and often lots of the attack is the best form of defence thinking, rising up to stop you. And it also asks you for a 180-degree change of attitude too and that’s often bloody terrifying, like been thrown out the airlock of a space ship with no space suit, all the pix of exploding bodies from B-movies rise up in your mind!

Some clients prefer to walk away rather than try that, the befriending technique. That always makes me sad. Their brains have turned a relative molehill into a mountain … so they stay in the energy-consuming combative mode, and so stay imprisoned by their fears.

The old magic/shaman ways I was brought up show you how to befriend what scares you silly … and they go on to show you that more likely than not what you fear turns out to be your best ally!

Whoa! What? Fear is my ally? Never … !!!

Yes, sorry but yes it often is.