Stop Trying to Overcome Fear and Do This Instead
This post was originally published on Soulaia.com. This version has been lightly updated over time to reflect my current voice, links, and evolving understanding while preserving the heart and core message of the original article.
“Hi, my name is fear,” said that palpable, shivering sensation in my chest. It was a familiar sensation. You see, fear and I had known each other for a long time. She (fear) had graced my life when I first found out, at the age of 11, that my mother had breast cancer. She was with me during that 4th grade spelling bee where I embarrassingly misspelled “shepherd”. She was with me when I moved to California, by myself, at the age of 21 and drove on the freeway alone just a few months later. She was with me as I mustered up the courage to tell the attractive guy at the gym (who’d been playing eye-tag with me for months) that I was interested, and she was certainly with me last year when I found out that one of my dear friends was in critical condition after a mountain-climbing accident.
Given how often and how long fear seems to grace our lives, some might expect it to slowly wither and eventually go away. But the fact is – it doesn’t. Fear is part of being human. It may change shape over time, but it rarely disappears entirely. She (I call my fear “she”, you may call yours “she”, “he, “it” or anything else that resonates) takes vacations, she gets smaller, she morphs into different physical sensations, on occasion she lets me pretend she’s not there, but she never goes away completely.
When I realized, a few years ago, that fear was here to stay, I stopped fighting with her. I stopped trying to make her go away, and I listened to her instead. Here is what she had to say:
KNOW THAT FEAR IS TRYING TO HELP
She told me that fear is always trying to help. Fear isn’t out to get me and it isn’t out to get you either. Despite popular belief, fear isn’t trying to ruin your life or prevent you from getting what you want. It's simply drawing your attention to the areas of your life you've learned to approach more carefully… the places where you have some history and where a bit of caution or protection may once have been helpful. To see fear as the enemy is a disservice to why it is here in the first place. Fear often points us toward what matters most to us. You can’t overcome fear, but you can befriend it.
You can't overcome fear, but you can befriend it.
GET TO KNOW FEAR
You can befriend this fear simply by getting curious about it, as you would anyone new in your life. Begin to ask your fear questions like “What’s your story?”, “How long have you been around?”, “Why are you here?”, “What role do you play in my life?”, “What purpose do you serve?”, and “How can I get to know you better?” You may be surprised to discover that beneath fear's intensity is often a deep desire to protect you.
Often, we take the stage for our first 500+ person talk, pick up the phone to talk to someone we’ve been in conflict with, decide to take that job 2,500 miles away, or make the decision to ask someone we’re interested in out on a date without acknowledging the fearful emotions in our heart and the sensations in our body that come along with them. One thing that was clear to me in my interactions with fear, and with anyone in my emotional family for that matter, was that she wanted to be acknowledged. Courage isn’t acting as if you’re unafraid. It’s acknowledging that you feel fear, that you – like everyone else – are not immune from it. Courage, therefore, isn’t about whether you have fear but about what you do when fear shows up.
Courage isn't about whether you have fear, but about what you do when fear shows up.
Because fear itself isn't the problem. The question is whether we fight it, ignore it, obey it unquestioningly and let it make all our decisions, or learn to listen to it with curiosity and discernment. And courage then isn't the absence of fear — it's learning how to move forward with fear in the passenger seat instead of behind the wheel.
GIVE FEAR A VOICE
When I paused and said, “Hey, my friend fear, what is it that you want me to know?”, I heard some of the most kind and caring things that you would expect, or hope, a loving parent would say to their child. Fear said that she doesn’t want me to get hurt, or to feel embarrassed, or to think badly of myself if things don’t go as I’d hoped. When I asked “What are you afraid would happen if you weren’t around?”, she told me that she was trying to protect me from sadness, disappointment, rejection, and pain. She wanted to make sure I didn’t feel those things, but she also wanted to make sure I reached my highest potential and that I felt as much joy and fulfillment as I could. Her purpose, she said, isn’t to stop me from acting upon my wishes and dreams, but to make me pause and yield for a moment before proceeding to pursue them. So, take that pause, yield for a moment, and get to know fear’s story. Letting fear speak and listening to what it has to say before deciding what comes next is often more helpful than trying to silence it.
DO IT AFRAID
In her book, Wild, Cheryl Strayed wrote that “fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves”. Well, if fear is influenced by the stories we tell ourselves, then we can begin to explore those stories with curiosity and decide whether they still fit. As I continued listening, fear told me a few things that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear while I was at her mercy all those years earlier, before I really got to know her. She said that Nike wasn’t the first to be branded with the slogan “just do it”. It’s been her motto for thousands and thousands of years. In addition to vetting the person and/or situation at hand, another option is to "just do it." "It" being that thing you're afraid to do. If you’re afraid that your voice doesn’t matter, you’ve got to let your voice be heard. If you’re afraid that you’ll be rejected by that job or that person, you’ve got to get out there and start the conversation or send the application. If you wait forever for fear to go away, you’ll be waiting forever to do all the things that you dream of doing, all the things that bring you joy, all the things that are leading you to a more complete, more present, and more fulfilled version of you. So trust that courage is already there. It always has been. And know that courage isn't the absence of fear. It's what becomes possible when fear doesn't make all of our decisions.
HAVE FAITH IN FEAR, EVERY SINGLE TIME
You may remember that when fear told me she was here to stay, I chose to get to know her. “Since you’re not going anywhere”, I said, “let’s see how we can do this thing called life together”, and she obliged.
The result? I learned, in a very genuine way, that the most important lesson of all, is that the only way to loosen fear’s grip on our lives is to Stop trying to overcome or conquer fear. Get to know fear instead. The best thing that came out of it though, was that I developed a very real and unwavering faith in fear. Some say that we must live by faith, not by fear. I say we can learn to have faith in fear itself — not in the sense that we believe every fearful thought or let fear make all of our decisions, but in the sense that we trust fear is trying to tell us something important.
When you put your faith in fear, you acknowledge that it's trying to protect you, that it serves a purpose, and that beneath its intensity often lies something you deeply care about… something that matters a lot to you, some place you long to grow, or somewhere you might be trying to protect old wounds. The same may be true of many of our difficult emotions. Rather than seeing them as obstacles to overcome, we can begin to view them as messengers carrying important information about our needs, values, wounds, and desires. (What Your Difficult, “Negative” Emotions May Be Trying to Tell You explores this idea more deeply). Above all, you begin to recognize that fear isn't always standing between you and the life you want. Sometimes, it's pointing toward the places where growth, meaning, courage, and possibility live.
Many of us spend years trying to silence, overcome, or outsmart our difficult emotions, only to discover that what we truly need is a different relationship with them. Learning to listen to our fears, understand the protective parts of ourselves, and respond with greater compassion is something I explore more deeply inside my course, Happy from the Inside Out®. If you're ready to stop fighting your inner world and start building a more trusting relationship with it, I'd love to see you there!
