Stop Letting Fear Limit Your Life  

The greatest limiter in your life is your fear. By learning to live with and go through your fear barrier, you will be opening yourself to a life of joy, freedom and wider possibilities than you imagined. In this article I am not going to talk about clinical fears, anxieties or phobias, just the everyday house and garden variety that all people carry.

What is fear?

Fear is Future Events Appearing Real. This means we create an image in our mind of a possible event and its consequences. We create it so strongly in our mind, we trigger a physical response to the thought. This response is often butterflies in our stomach, dry mouth, sinking feeling or shaking. All are responses to the adrenaline and sugars secreted by our system to deal with the potential threat.

The problem comes as the event has not yet occurred and may not ever occur. It is like going to a bank and saying—”I am thinking of borrowing some money in the future. Tell you what, let me pay you $5000 in interest just in case I do decide to take out that loan”. It is a wasted emotion and wasted energy. But what triggers this fear in the first place?

Fear and Comfort Zones

Fear is often triggered when we reach the edge of our comfort zone. A comfort zone is our personal area of thought or action that we are comfortable doing over and over. When we start to get towards the edge of our zone, we trigger our level 2 fears. We feel bad inside, so we withdraw, give up, get angry or find a way to sabotage ourselves so we do not have to face the fear. We each have a unique way of stopping ourselves. The trick is to work out what your stop light is so you can choose another way of responding.

If you catch yourself reaching your fear boundary—say “thanks, now I know how close I am getting to solving this fear”, and then keep on going.

Unless we are constantly expanding our comfort zones, they contract much like shrink wrap. Our lives become narrow, tight and without air and juice.

5 Tips to face your fears

1.  “I am excited”. Remember the common feelings in our body from fear? These are the identical feelings we get when we are excited. Sometimes we get them mixed up—for example, screaming with excitement while thundering down a massive rollercoaster. If we can do it sometimes—wouldn’t it be great if we did it more often? Re-label fear as excitement and use the energy for positive action.
2. Link them to your values. Work out why facing your fear would benefit your highest values—write 100 reasons why doing it would benefit the most important things in your life and 100 reasons why not doing it would create hardship for the most important things. You need to know why taking action will help your life—you need to create new pathways of thinking in your brain, which is why you need a minimum of 200 reasons.
3. Phone a friend - sometimes you need a supportive friend to help you through. Superman underwear is out of fashion—so if you need support ask for it.
4. Work up to it—you don’t need to jump in and face your deepest fear all at once. Start with something small representing the fear and gradually increase the gradient of fear. For example—start with a drawing of a mouse and work up slowly until you can look at one in a cage.
5. Just do it! Fear does not go away by just thinking about it—you have to do something about it. The only way to face a fear is by facing it and learning that you can handle it!

Embrace your fears and embrace your failures—through them you discover what within you needs healing and where you are carrying beliefs that no longer serve you.

Ingrid Cliff is a Brisbane based Business Development and Human Resources Consultant to Small and Medium Businesses with her company Heart Harmony www.heartharmony.com.au.