Moving Despite Fear

I wonder whether this is Fearless Friday. I've seen posts on fear today from Ryan Holiday, Marisa Peer and others.

I want to say a bit about fear as well, starting with a second-guess of my name for today. I'd prefer to call it Fear, And... Friday.

The thing is, I don't think we should set ourselves challenges that are unnecessarily difficult. And I think fearlessness, if it is attainable at all by a person who has the neurological capacity to experience the full range of human emotion, is overkill for practical purposes. No one needs to be fearless.

Fear is there to alert us to a perceived threat to something we value. I wouldn't want to desensitize that system, because it might leave me unconcerned about things that really should grab my attention. But of course, our modern world triggers our fear in countless cases that are not actual threats. These 'false positives', especially future-oriented anxiety, are often unhelpful.

These false alarms can keep us from having vital conversations, taking necessary action or following our passion. Fear can hold us back from the full lives we want and deserve. It can dissipate and consume our energy. What to do?

I don't aim to eradicate or ignore my feeling of fear, even its unhelpful instances. I've never succeeded with that, and I'm not sure I can. Feelings of fear visit me, uninvited. I have enough experience with them to know that many cases are false alarms. Even so, they carry the potential to kick me into habituated reactions (my personal enactments of the universal fight, flight, freeze set) that don't serve me well.

The two things I do:

• Acknowledge the fear to myself and name it. In effect, I'm saying to the fear, I hear your alarm, and I understand you're letting me know of a potential threat. There's plenty of science behind this, but I'll anthropomorphize my explanation by saying this keeps the fear from continuing to 'dial itself up' in order to be heard.
• Focus on its physical aspect - the sensation of it in my body. This feeling often has an unbearable quality to it, and in my early days, it allowed fear to get the better of me. Its seemingly overwhelming nature turned me from its identified threat. A period of (likely uncomfortable) experimentation goes a long way to dissolving this spell. The key is to ride the intense feeling out and learn through personal experience that it is (usually) perfectly manageable.

My late teens and early twenties involved some intense experiences that taught me the feeling of fear was NOT unbearable - that I could be in the midst of even its strongest incarnations and still move forward, into and through the action it warned me was impossible.

To be clear, in those 'enlightening' situations, I still felt fear, as you and I still do these days. I was not fearless. I just came to view the feeling of fear as information to be considered as part of the entire current experience rather than something that somehow trumped all else and determined my course.

This is also different from ignoring fear. I took it and I take it into account. And sometimes, it still plays a significant role in decisions. Considered with all else, its warning can still contribute to a decision to avoid that which it sees as a threat. But more often, I thank it for looking out for me, but let it know I've got things from here, as I move forward despite it.

If you knew how weak a person I am, you'd see there's no reason you can't change your relationship with fear like I have. I must thank other people for orchestrating the special situations that helped my transition, but you can count on life to serve you up enough material to experiment with! So go ahead: fear, and... move forward.