Fear exists for everyone in their life, no matter where they are at. It is a completely and totally natural thing and one that keeps us alive. However, in some instances, many of us allow this fear to drive us and we allow it to stop us from doing things. Remember when you were young, how you used to do things that now would stop you cold. When we first started school, there was no real fear of rejection – had we listened to that fear like we sometimes do as adults, how would we have ever made those childhood friends and how would we have grown up. As we get older, and as we start to listen to the opinions of everyone else, it is then that we start allowing those fears to control us until one day, we realise that there is a very real problem with us.
I allowed fear to drive and guide my life for many years, until it landed me in a very bad place, totally afraid of everything and even to scared to go out on my own. In a defining moment in my own life, I decided that I was going to reclaim my own personal power, and start working on them, one by one. I am not going to say that I no longer have any fears, however, I can openly and honestly say that I no longer allow my fear to “live my life” for me.
These are a few of the very simple steps that I took to overcome these fears: -
1) Take the focus off yourself. If you notice a situation where you get fearful, more often than not, it is because your are focusing on what is going on for you personally. What if this happens or what if that happens or what it this gets said – most of the time, it is all internal reflection on yourself. Stop focusing on what is in it for you, or what could happen and begin to think about how things could happen for the other person – maybe you are afraid of speaking to someone new because you don’t want to rejected. Instead of thinking of yourself, think about how their life could be made different by having a friend like you. When you start focusing outwardly, the fear immediately diminishes and it becomes way easier to do things.
2) Respect that other people have the right to their own opinion, and that by them saying what they feel does not have anything to do with you personally. If someone offers me onions and I don’t eat onions, I have the right to refuse them. It is nothing personal against him who offers them to me, it is just me allowing myself to say what works for me.
3) Would you rather have someone be honest with you at the onset, rather than find out months or weeks down the line that because they were too afraid to express their opinions, they had been lying to you? It is better to have a “no” or a “rejection” at the onset, because someone is being open and honest with you, rather than them lying to you and leading you on, only to cause you to feel pain in the end.
4) Thomas Edison made many different light bulbs before he came across one that actually worked. What if he had given up after the first go? Where would we be today? What better way to get to the person who seriously wants to talk to us or get to know us than by getting all the other ones out of the way first. We will never get to a “yes” without making the wrong type of light bulbs first. Another way of looking at this, if every offer we made was accepted, we would then have to be the one doing all the rejecting, and let me tell you, I don’t think I would want to be in that position where because everything has gone my way, I now have to do something I used to fear.
5) Our fears can also bring to our attention things that we can work on and improve in our own lives. They can help us to accept that there are areas of our lives that we need help or assistance with, that we can work on to become a better person, a more authentic and honest person and someone who is genuine, rather than pretending a lot, and this was something that I found the most rewarding out of all of it.
