Overcoming Fear
|
To conquer your fears, you must acknowledge your fears. There’s a good reason why acknowledgement is the first step in every recovery program - you can’t fight an enemy you can’t see. Try the following exercise: This could bring about the breakthrough you have been seeking in improving your levels of confidence and success. Ask yourself the following four questions: What am I afraid of? How is this fear holding me back? Has this fear ever helped me? What would be the benefits of eliminating this fear?
|
|
Explore the nature of your fear: What specifically is it that you fear? Is it what people will say about you? What exactly are you concerned about? Try to unearth as many details as you can. The more precisely you can define the reasons behind your fear the better.
Write down the answers and review them fully. Fear is like an illness, left undiagnosed and untreated it can cause damage. Undertaking this exercise allows you to fully diagnose your fears. Once they are correctly diagnosed, you must treat them in order to eliminate them. Instead of retreating from them, as you may well have done in the past, I want you to move towards your fears and the situations that you encounter them. Instead of avoiding them, confront them. Confront the fear head on by doing what you have been afraid of. Do it, although you may feel weak, fearful or overwhelmed and the courage will come afterwards. The trick here is that we don’t need to take bold, courageous action. Tiny action works just fine to begin with. Tiny actions bypass the automatic fear response in our brains. We may get paralyzed when tackling big challenges all at once, but less likely when concentrating on tiny actions. And as soon as we have our first small success, we start building the confidence to go on. Small actions also serve another very important purpose: they are excellent feedback mechanisms.
Write down the answers and review them fully. Fear is like an illness, left undiagnosed and untreated it can cause damage. Undertaking this exercise allows you to fully diagnose your fears. Once they are correctly diagnosed, you must treat them in order to eliminate them. Instead of retreating from them, as you may well have done in the past, I want you to move towards your fears and the situations that you encounter them. Instead of avoiding them, confront them. Confront the fear head on by doing what you have been afraid of. Do it, although you may feel weak, fearful or overwhelmed and the courage will come afterwards. The trick here is that we don’t need to take bold, courageous action. Tiny action works just fine to begin with. Tiny actions bypass the automatic fear response in our brains. We may get paralyzed when tackling big challenges all at once, but less likely when concentrating on tiny actions. And as soon as we have our first small success, we start building the confidence to go on. Small actions also serve another very important purpose: they are excellent feedback mechanisms.
|
|
Each small step can be used to correct your course of action. A plane is slightly off-course much of the time, but since it continually uses its instruments’ feedback to correct its route, it’s able to get to its destination with precision. So, think of the tiniest action step possible in your project and do it now. After you’re done with that, get to the next one and then the next one, until your project is complete, one tiny step at a time. There is no other way to conquering your fears than to size them up and commit to doing battle with them. Let me tell you,
|
you can conquer them and enjoy the sweet taste of victory. You can eliminate them from playing a major part in your thought process. Then and only then will you become virtually unstoppable on your journey towards increased confidence and success.
