Overcoming Fear
Faith and fear cannot coexist. It's impossible. Both ask us to believe in something we cannot see, but only one gives us power. The other takes it away.
I've operated from fear a lot in my life. Fear of not enough-ness, fear of not being loved, fear of failure. The thing about fear is that it is all-consuming. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it is a powerful force. But only if you let it. So why even give it permission?
I know it's difficult to not give into fear. But what we have to realize, is that even if our fear is realized and a worse-case scenario does happen, you'll get through it. It might not be pretty or predictable. It might even feel worse than you thought. But the sun will come out the next day and life will continue to move along. You just have to decide to move along with it and not be paralyzed in it.
On the flip side there's something powerful. Often times people operate on faith because they don't even know any better. Children are a great example of this. When my daughter was little, she was (and still is) fearless around snakes, even though they creep me out. I can be sent into a tailspin at the thought of having to touch one or seeing a snake on the trail. However, I wanted to be sure that as a parent, I didn't push my fears onto my child. So, when we saw snakes at the zoo or in the wild, we would talk about how fascinating they were....all the while feeling like my skin would crawl off me because they freaked me out so much. My daughter spent a lot of her younger years catching snakes and researched everything about them from diet to habitat. Everything about them was precious and joyous to her. When she was four or five we went to a snake exhibition at a wildlife park and she was the only one in the audience who even knew the kind of snake on display. The handler was so impressed that she got to come up and assist with the demonstration. Not only did I not pass my unfounded fear onto my child, but in cultivating a joy for it, it shaped a lot of her joy and activities as a little one. We have great power and influence on other's without even always knowing what the outcome may be. I'm glad I didn't deprive my child of something that gives her joy because I was afraid of it.
Now this situation isn't entirely what this article is getting at, but you understand the idea, right? Fear just breeds more fear usually. The goal is to create a faith in the good stuff. We can all learn from the eagerness and faith of a child. Children don't operate in fear because they don't have experience in it. It is a learned trait. As adults, we must unlearn it in many aspects of our lives from relationships to following our passion as a living.
When it comes to having faith in our our lives in the day-to-day and the big picture stuff we have to follow our gut and ask ourselves what makes us happy. In my years of coaching and working with others in their careers and life goals, I encounter so many people who don't take the leap into what they really want to do out of fear for financial instability and failure. Often times I hear the back-up plan became the career or life path inadvertently, often times without even trying to make it in the direction they longed for.
It's easy to talk about living fearlessly, but how do we actually do it? I've learned that taking the leap of faith is actually easier than we think. I'm not suggesting to through caution to the wind and not worry about anything. On the contrary, I think that fear offers up it's own set of lessons to guide us in the right direction. Let's take a look at my daughter's love of snakes again. She didn't blindly go chasing snakes across trails and in our backyard without being educated on what types were safe to handle. She understood some fears as being healthy to keep her safe, such as washing her hands before handling a snake after handling its food, having an adult present when she was with a constrictor and never going near a poisonous one. These fears come from her education on the subject, not from blindly having a phobia (much like mine).
Fear challenges us to look at different scenarios and plan for what could arise. Most adults fear financial instability as the main reason they don't follow their dreams. Often I'm asked how I became so accomplished at such a young age and in hindsight it was more of naivety they anything else. But now that I'm a little wiser, I realize that growing up economically challenged actually offered me less fear of failure and fear of financial instability because it was such a common way of life that I knew. Those who grow up with more privilege and security may be more afraid of losing what they know.
But in the end, it's faith that carries us through to see our goals met and dreams reached. Faith is so much stronger than fear when we harness it the same way we allow fear to help us keep our bases covered. Faith isn't blind in this case. We don't rush into a career to become a rock star without learning the fundamentals of music first. With a graduate degree in social science, I have no illusions it's going to get me on a path as an astronaut. The choices we make lead us to living fearlessly so it becomes our state of mind and fear no longer guides our decisions.
Here are steps we can take to start walking down the path to a more fulfilling life:
Assess what you do now, whether it be career, family, hobbies, etc. Be honest about what your life looks like currently. Do you have time for friends/family commitments? Are you fulfilled each day at work? Are you happy where you are living?
What did you want to do before you went down this current path? Did you want another career? Did you want to live elsewhere? Did you picture something differently? And is this desire one you still have?
What are you most afraid of in changing directions? How does it physically make you feel? How does it emotionally make you feel? If this fear were realized, how devastating would it be? What's the worst-case scenario?
What are you most excited about? What makes you want to head down a new path? Do you have faith in your abilities to achieve it?
How prepared are you to shift gears? What feels more powerful when looking at this new path, faith in your ability to do it or fear of failure and it not working out?
These questions can get the juices flowing to help us assess if we are currently living in fear or living fearlessly. Living fearlessly and accepting faith in ourselves takes practice. Practice isn't a one and done scenario but daily work over and over again. We all deserve to operate our lives in faith and be happy. What are you waiting for?