Don’t let fear control you. It’s your friend.

One of the best things about being a parent is the ability to revisit your own decisions and assess how they are showing up in your life. One of the concepts that has been popping up a lot with my young son is the concept of fear. Fear is an important thing to master in life as it will rule your experience unless you have a good ability to grapple with it. Don’t underestimate fear. It can paralyse us and control our actions within a split second. I don’t think it is possible to avoid feeling fear, but it is possible to train yourself to be able to handle fear whenever it comes up.

To do this you must understand the difference between danger and fear. Many people bundle the two as one. Fear certainly wants you to but and that’s because it doesn’t really exist. Fear’s big secret is that it can’t hurt you. It never could because fear exists in the mind. When we learn to control our mind, we can learn to control our fear. We can have fear serve us. This is true for all your emotions but let’s focus for the sake of this article. When you paralyse yourself from this invisible force you are really shackling yourself.

It is important here to stop for a moment and define how i am using the word existence. There are many things in our lives that have effects but do not actually exist. Money, Society, Business. All of these things are mental formations and don’t exist in objective reality. The only reason they have any effect on us is that there is a shared belief. If some cosmic event wiped out every last human then they would cease to exist. This differs to the plants, air and animals around us. Even if they were completely disintegrated, then their atoms would still be there. This is what i mean by things existing vs those that don’t. When you master this distinction you take back a lot of power about the world around you and how it affects you.

Fear operates by the same concept. The fears we have are made up by our mind and are only given gravity by how much we believe in them. If we don’t give them control, then they can be quite useful in helping us understand ourselves at a deeper level.

The key distinction I make with my son is that we need to analyse our fears to see if there is any danger. Most of our fears come from our evolutionary experience of things that could kill us, or more accurately, things that could harm us. Many things could harm us but very few could injure us physically.

If you use this framework to assess your fears you will quickly find that a lot of the things you are afraid of don’t even exist. The first step is to notice your fears. Stop, breathe and look at your fear directly. It can’t hurt you. It’s just an idea. Next, decide if there is any physical danger attached to the fear. We can quite clearly see that a fear of walking down a dark alley probably has a very good use whereas a fear of speaking in public has very little basis.

Once we master this framework we effectively master our fear and each time we use it, we grow stronger. The stronger we are, the more freedom we have to explore our fears and dig into the most important growth areas of our life.

Are you afraid to talk to people? Are you afraid of walking into a gym? Are you afraid of being successful?

Once we master our fear, we can engage more effectively in life.

Make sure you keep an eye out for danger … but fear is now your friend.