Overcoming Fears
Welcome everyone to the mind for life podcast where we help you to learn how to transform your thinking in order to transform your life. It’s great to have you with us today. Last week, we had a great interview with Chance of strategic secrets.com and Chance brought some great knowledge about success and failure and he gave us some insight into how he thinks and succeeds in life. If you haven’t heard that interview, take a listen and also if you’re interested in how to monetize your skills – that is what Chance specializes in. If you go to the show notes for last week’s episode, you can click on the link to Chance’s course and find out how you can monetize your skills. And I want to remind you to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. There’s a link right on the website to Subscribe so go ahead and help us out with that if you will.
Now today we are going to talk about a topic that is devastating to some people – and that’s fear. Fear is an incredibly powerful emotion and it can literally paralyze us in our lives. In some cases Fear can grip us so powerfully that we are unable to physically move. But when I talk about paralyzing fear, what more likely happens is it prevents us from doing something. Now today I am going to address some common fears – and I’m not talking about fear of heights or fear of spiders – which I have, by the way
Story of almost getting in a car wreck when a spider dropped in front of my face while driving.
Or even the fear of public speaking – which is another popular one.
But today I want to talk about fears that prevent us from being more successful and having a more fulfilling life. See fear is just a way of thinking about the world – it’s in our mind. We are afraid because our thoughts turn toward things that are unpleasant.
Maybe you’ve had this experience – a loved one doesn’t show up when they are supposed to and you don’t get a call and you can’t reach them. This is a ripe opportunity for fear to set in because our brains begin to formulate potentials of what might have happened.
I remember a time my wife didn’t come home and I couldn’t get a hold of her and she wouldn’t answer her phone. I was pretty good for about a half-hour, but after that, I started to think about what might have happened and No one could reach her so I became extremely afraid that something bad happened. It was nothing but I remember distinctly how my thinking could quickly descend into a paralyzing fear even when nothing had happened.
Well fear works like that when it serves its purpose, it is a protective emotion – when we start to experience fear, it can prevent us from doing things that might harm us. But an unhealthy fear can really mess up our quality of life and paralyze us and prevent us from living a fulfilled life.
Some common fears that prevent us from living a more fulfilled life and that we can address are:
Fear of what we cannot control – many people are afraid of things outside what’s called their sphere of influence. There are certain things in life that we have some control over – what we eat and how healthy our diet is might be one of them. So if we are afraid of having a heart attack fore example, that’s something we can control and begin to take steps to prevent – by eating the right foods and cardio vascular exercise. However being afraid of an earthquake might be something outsider of our sphere of influence. Of course we can move to a place where there are less earthquakes than other places, but really that’s something we can’t control
Fear of not being good enough – this is called imposter syndrome and there are greater and lesser versions of this. Some people who are extreme high achievers have this to the point that they live their lives in a constant fear that someone will find out they are a fake – a phony. To a lesser extent, other people fear they are not good enough or smart enough to venture out and do something. This can be a lack of confidence, but even more so, it is a fear that prevents us from doing things and growing as a person. This is also related to
Fear of failure. This fear isn’t just about not being good enough but it is being afraid of failing at something. For whatever reason people are afraid to fail – as if that says they are a failure as a person, and maybe that’s what they think. But fear of failure can also prevent us from even trying something.
There’s a ton of common fears out there but let me address the ones that are based on lies. These three fears arise out of believing something about the world that is simply not true.
First, we fear what we can’t control many times based upon superstition. In our desire to control the things we cannot, we often revert to superstitions and rituals in an effort to make sense of the world and find a way to control it. This is why in ancient times people made sacrifices to the Gods. Magic was the first technology – a series of rituals and incantations in an effort to control nature. If we need rain, we call the shaman to perform the ceremony so the crops would grow. And if it didn’t work, well the shaman did something wrong – but the ritual, the magic was there to alleviate our fear of what cannot be controlled.
We do this today as well – I call it fatalism where people blame God for whatever happens in life as if that was part of some divine plan. It’s very hard to make sense of a supposed “good” god who has a plan to give your daughter cancer and kill her before she turns 5. It’s no wonder why people turn away from a God like that. I’m not a fatalist and I recognize the infinite complexity of what’s going on, but at the same time, I am a Christian and I believe in God’s omnipotence. How do you reconcile these things? Jaques Ellul called it a dialectic – recognizing a tension between two extremes that both exist at the same time, yet are opposite truths. Martin Buber called it walking the narrow ridge – he talked about walking down the path of life between two great chasms on each side and not having a certain knowledge about either. There are things we simply cannot know – and if you’ve listed to my podcast on what science can really tell us, you would know that we will never know and any human who says they know with absolute certainty is lying or delusional. We can’t control things and we need to develop an awareness of that rather than allowing it to paralyze us.
Second – the belief that you aren’t good enough is an untruth. Because no one is good enough at first. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that we can learn and that we can grow and that we can become something that we are not now in time. No one great ever started out great – they worked their way up to it. We see people who are doing great things and we think we could never do what they are doing but the truth is when they started, they were just as we were. The difference is that they started. So don’t be afraid you aren’t good enough because you are good enough and if you work hard you can accomplish things you can only dream about. It’s pretty much simply about getting started.
And the last one is the fear of failure – this is based on a lie that failure is a bad thing – that it labels us with some sort of black X or something. Failure is a necessary part of learning. You never get better unless you fail. You never grow unless you realize something didn’t work our right. And many times when people fail, they quit. This is called failing backward and what we need to do is to fail forward. To learn and to get up and to keep going. The story goes that as an inventor, Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
See – this is a different perspective a different thought about failure, not that its an end, but rather that it is one more step on the journey
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Thanks again and let me leave you with a final thought for the week what fear is paralyzing you and preventing you from being happy and more fulfilled and ask yourself this question – what lie is that fear based on. Think about then and then fight against it with the truth.
Have a great week!