#299: Fear is holding you back.
What decisions would you make if you weren’t afraid?
There’s a life out there waiting for you that would be yours if it weren’t for fear.
I see so much fear. I see it all the time. I feel it in me. I see it in others.
Fear is like the grim reaper, he comes in the night wearing that black cloak and chokes you up. Paralyses you.
Fear likes to come dressed up as money. Fear loves money. Money is the perfect conduit for fear to breed and dig its thorny claws into you.
Fear comes in many forms. Fear of failure. Fear of who you might become (success). Fear of rejection. Fear of the unknown. Fear of letting go. Fear of abandonment. Fear of not being needed. Fear of past trauma. Fear of going backwards.
Whatever flavour the fear is in, it’s a double glazed window that stops you walking forward into the world that’s waiting for you. You can see through it, but you can’t walk through - you keep bumping into that same fear again and again. Worse still, your mind becomes the window which you look out into the world of what you could be doing. Fear is the looking glass stopping you stepping forward.
My fears usually centre around money, conflating money to worth. Therefore being afraid of being worthless. I also love to be afraid of the unknown and enjoy spending my time controlling as much as I can to avoid the unavoidable unknown of life itself. I resist being alone too, with a deep fear of loneliness - despite consistently proving to myself that when I’m comfortable “on my own” - I feel more connected than ever.
It’s hard to fully smash through your fears and remove them forever. What’s more realistic is the practice of consistently facing them. In this sense being fearless is not having no fear at all, it’s your willingness to face fear head on.
It’s the most simple inquiry in the world, but simply asking yourself what you are afraid is powerful. What are you afraid of?
Right now I’m afraid of sitting in my office alone for 8 hours and writing a book. I’m afraid it won’t work. I’m afraid I’ll fail. I’m afraid I’ll waste my time. I’m afraid I’ll be a total failure.
I could have many therapy sessions about all of these things, but I’ve found that only gets you so far. It’s better to do some version of your own exposure therapy. Take managed risks that encourage you to face your fears.
For me this might be, spend one full day writing my book. Say no to all paid work for that day and spend a full day on it. I’m sure this will go well. Then next, it’ll be to do it again. Do it for two days. These risks at your edges encourage you to expand and grow, into your fear.
Money is a good one. If your fears centre around money. Losing it, not having it, never having it. Then my invitation to you is to spend it or try a period where you have less of it. Whatever fear money is harbouring for you, will quickly come to the fore and you can face it by using money as the conduit. Obviously don’t do anything stupid (this isn’t financial advice) but if you’re worried about never having money (when you actually have a decent amount in the bank), buy something for yourself that celebrates how far you’ve come. I’m certain when you do this, you’ll open up space to generate even more money in the future.
Fear is always holding us back. Keeping us safe, both from harm, but also from risk. Listening to some of this is healthy. It stops you spending your life savings on bitcoin. But lots of your fear is stopping you from walking forward into the life that you can actually see for yourself - the life behind the looking glass.
I believe facing our fears isn’t something we do once, or once and for all. It’s something we do daily, consistently and marginally. Until one day we’ve moved the looking glass so close to the life we want that we are actually there, living it, with no fear. That starts today. It could be a LinkedIn post. It could be a conversation. It’s a managed risk. It’s a task that makes you squirm, a bit. Something that makes your heart race just a little bit.
For example, for me, right now, I feel excited writing this blog post in this form. Where I’m being a little bit more forthright in saying what I think and telling people what to do. I feel excited, as if I might be growing a bit here, expanding into a fear, into an edge. I’ve been afraid of being “worthless” of “not making anything of myself” so it feels scary to write on an ethereal topic with no attachment to the outcome. Yet that was the prompt I gave to myself this week; “Write with abandon” Write without fear.
Fear is holding you back and it always will. Yet we all have a chance to catch it. To notice it steal into our lives and put us in our own glass box. We can notice those moments we bump our head into the looking glass of our lives where fear is holding us back. Then, we can choose to face fear. Take a risk, knock on the glass, walk around it. Take an action that puts us in contact with our fear - like a game, an experiment.
Do this and fear doesn’t necessarily evaporate, but we move through it.
Actually, we move with it.
Fear will always remain, but we don’t remain the same.
James
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