Most of the time we think of fear in the obvious ways: fear of heights, of failure or success for that matter. Fear of dogs, being alone, rejection. These can all be crippling for sure, but fear is even more insidious. It can creep into all areas of our lives and is the undercurrent to many other negative emotions.
When it get's right down to it all motivation comes from emotion. We do things because of how they feel or how we want to feel so all our behavior is based on emotions as well.
While it may seem there are dozens of emotions they're actually all simply different expressions or manifestations of the two underlying ones that rule our lives: Fear and Love.
Fear is closed, judgmental, rejecting. It seeks to hinder, protect, hold back, restrict. It is destructive.
Love is open, accepting, curious, embracing. It seeks to celebrate, experience, expand and grow. It is creative.
Think about the emotions of hate, joy, guilt, compassion, adventure, you can quickly see where these feelings fall.
One of the problems with fear that we often overlook is that as the opposite of love it gets in our way of experiencing and expressing love in our lives.
When we have fear it blocks our ability to truly experience all the great stuff available to us. It does this by restricting what we can share but also by limiting what we will allow in. It is important to realize that the walls we build to protect ourselves from bad stuff coming in keeps the good stuff out as well. This is obviously a huge stumbling block in relationships and a killer of true intimacy. It causes us to hold back pieces of ourselves or to feel jealous, suspicious and untrusting. To a large extent the quality of our personal relationships and certainly the depth of them is completely dependent on how much we are able to let go of fear and fully open to love. Fear is the reason we do not have deeper and more meaningful relationships. It keeps us from accepting and embracing others and from trusting them and ourselves enough to create the connections we yearn for. It seeps into the relationships we have and plays with our insecurities and ignites flare ups. While we carefully seek out someone to trust and rely on, it is crucial we learn to trust ourselves so that we can be free enough to share all of who we are with another. Sure, we all have been hurt, but for many of us that hurt plays a role throughout our lives if we let it continue to limit us.
Fear not only cripples our being open to people but also being open to experiences as well. This happens when we decide not to try something new, afraid we may not like it or could get hurt or disappointed. We allow the possibility of a negative experience to prevent discovering something new that we may really enjoy. Some folks refuse to travel lest something happen to them, try a new restaurant or activity, "what if I don't like it?" they protest. Well, what if you do?
We forget that everything we currently enjoy at one time was new to us and may have even been a bit scary or hard.
Another aspect of fear that we fail to fully realize is the impact it has on our ability to pursue our dreams. We do not want to fail, or appear stupid. We have limiting beliefs about our abilities and multiple insecurities than can undermine our potential to succeed in both professional and personal pursuits. We are all familiar with this type of fear; of rejection, success, failure. We hedge our bets in a way, not pouring ourselves 100% into our endeavor so that if we fail we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge we did not really give it our all. When you think about it it makes no sense right? But we all know it is true.
Sometimes we hold ourselves back because what we truly want contradicts with a belief or value we strongly hold. These types of fears are often more deeply hidden. "Can I be a great Mother and be successful in my own business?"This one played in my head for years and gave me an excuse to wait till my children grew up to really pursue what I wanted for myself. Even now it can catch me up, having conflicting beliefs about caring for others first or attending to my own dreams. This is a big one for many women and is very complex and deeply rooted in culture, families and tied to our very identity as nurturing women.
Fear can be sneaky too and keep us stuck in jobs that we do not like or in relationships that do not serve us or may even be abusive. It is fear that something better is not out there for us that binds us to things we do not even want. This type of fear may be the worse because when we keep what we do not want it makes us unhappy but also fills the space blocking what we do want to come into our lives.
Sometimes wanting something is not enough. Working toward it is great but we must also let go of what we do not want to make room for it to fit into our lives. Letting go is frightening, what if we are left with less than what we have? So we settle. Fear is what makes people settle in all aspects of their lives for less than they want and certainly less than what is available to them. We fool ourselves into thinking something is better than nothing, but is it really? And might that something be standing in the way of something far better?
The F Bomb is a biggie. There is much to be explored and written.
In just these few examples we can see the way it interferes with our lives and undermines our achievements and happiness.
Something this pervasive has just got to go but how does one drop the F- bomb exactly?
First launch a search and destroy mission.
Shine a light in all the corners of our life and discover where fear is lurking and how it is undermining you.
Next, go to battle. Challenging your thinking and finding the truth, most fear is irrational after all.
Thirdly, develop courage. Do not wait for fear to pass, it may never completely, just have the courage to move forward despite fear, that is bravery. Remember who you are and what you are capable of, take stock of past achievements and build on strengths, recognize all you have already handled, use those truths to support you.
The keys to living the life that we want always begins with knowing ourselves, trusting ourselves and being true ourselves. Dropping the F-bomb takes some concentrated effort, but letting go of fear will explode your life with more happiness, success and meaning. It is well worth the effort to live this precious life as boldly and fully as we can because there is nothing more scary than spending our lives not living the way that we want.
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