Fear of failure, fear of loosing face, the fear of rejection, fear of the unknown, the fear of success….Whatever fears you face in your life it’s now time for you to face them.
There are literally millions of labels we can place on words and call them fears, as in the image above, the list is endless and different fears attack each and every one of us, and we react to these fears in different ways.
Every time we turn our backs on a fear and try to fight it, it becomes a pointless exercise and waste of our time, because fighting our fears places us in a ‘battle’ with that fear forever, whilst facing these fears will give us ‘freedom’ forever.
Our minds play tricks on us all the time, ‘the devil in our head’, ‘our sub conscious mind’, our Ego’s’ constantly chatter to us laying doubts on our ability to achieve, playing reference to things that have gone wrong in the past, and nagging us to stop right there and give up!…”Don’t be stupid, you know you will fail”, “It’s no point you doing that because no one will listen to you”, “Ah, they are just begging because they are too lazy to work so don’t give them your money”, “It’s not your problem, don’t get involved or it will end in tears, “Leave your job, are you stupid”, “Your not smart enough or worthy enough to do or go somewhere”……..How many of you have had these thoughts go through your head?
Strategies for Overcoming Fear
- Acknowledge the fear. Whether it’s imagined or real, the first step in overcoming fear is to admit that it exists. We all have fears; it’s human nature. Denying or ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.
- Analyze it. Where does it come from? Is it real or imagined? Can it be put in a different context? For instance if you think it through to its logical conclusion, what’s the worst that can happen to you? Once you’ve determined what that might be, ask yourself if you can deal with, or overcome it. More often than not, once you go through the process of analyzing it, the fear isn’t as scary as you originally imagined.
- Face it. Allow yourself to feel it, and then do it anyway. Act in spite of your fear and treat is as a challenge for personal growth and an opportunity to become stronger.
- Be persistent. Do the thing you fear over and over again. By doing it repeatedly it loses its power over you and you become less vulnerable to it.
- Develop courage. Sometimes the answer may not be to conquer a particular fear; it may be to develop courage. If you focus too much on any one fear instead of trying to build courage, you may in fact, intensify it. By developing courage you build self-confidence and resilience. You also build a healthy approach towards facing all fear.
Our fears of failure can limit us and keep us from living the life we want to. When we inevitably experience rejection or disappointment, we have to be hardy in our way of coping with these struggles. Overcoming our critical inner voice can be a vital step in becoming more emotionally resilient. We can learn skills to become hardier, and we can face challenges with fewer internal setbacks. Yet, the first step in taking on this new confidence is shedding the baggage of our past, the critical inner voices that falsely feed our fears of failure.
If you have chance look at a child, an elderly person or someone who is really poor, observe their behaviours and take note of how they live their lives.
And like Derek says
