How To Overcome Your Fear
If somebody would have told me five years ago that I would be writing an article that answers the question, “How do I overcome my fear” I would have laughed at them. Me? You see, my life was defined by it. I literally did nothing significant in life because, if the stakes were too high, I just froze.
Yet here I am. I’m blogging now and living a dream. I began to be aware of some things that shook me out of such limiting mindsets. If you, too, are struggling with fear, cozy on up—let’s start with a little story from my childhood.
When I was just a little guy, my dad would try to throw me on the back of his 1970’s Triumph dirt bike to explore the surrounding trails together. Sounds fun right? A lot of kids might have loved to do that with their dad but there was just one problem.
This bike was louder than thunder. It roared. It was so loud it would shake the house. When he kicked that engine over I went running.
Unfortunately, I missed out on a lot of great times because of the fear that bike caused me. It wasn’t until I was maybe 10 or 11 that I actually learned to ride on my own because I avoided bikes for all that time. And yet, riding became my passion in life and I worked up to winning a national championship.
What could fear be keeping you from?
Fear is really destructive. It keeps us from giving our best and living our most powerful life. I’m not sure why but, despite those consequences, we somehow accept it.
If you are ready to face your fear, I’m here to help you. I get fear. I lived under its rule for decades.
But I’ve learned we don’t have to submit to it. It can be put under control and you can be set free from its power. Here are 3 tips to help you overcome your fear:
Tip 1- Get On-Purpose
Do you know any people who only seem to lay around watching TV or playing video games (hopefully this isn’t you!). They have no goals, no desire to advance a cause, and no purpose.
It’s entirely possible they live in that manner because they are afraid of the things of life.
But I also think that the lifestyle they live also produces fear. This seems plausible to me because I believe they are trying to avoid discomfort or honest-to-goodness pain. When your desire is to live in complete comfort it’s easy to see that one of your biggest fears could be the disruption of that status quo. Such a person’s agenda begins to be dominated by this self-preservation.
Other than this goal of protecting one’s bubble, however, this person can be seen to unfortunately have no purpose either. Because of this, I think there is a link between fear and purpose.
As opposed to our lazy friends above, when we have purpose, we are engaging in something that we believe is bigger than us. We naturally take a backseat to its fulfillment because it is far more important to us than even our avoidance of discomfort of pain. We tend to not become as concerned about our own welfare relative to it. So it goes to follow then that as we take our eyes off of our personal well being and on to our purpose we find ourselves naturally overcoming fear.
We don’t have to look any further than historical accounts of war to find some exemplary accounts of people overcoming fear. Soldiers lived day in and day out with the prospect of death or serious harm. Somehow, they could put off their fear and do what seems almost impossible to me now—continue on in the midst of almost certain death.
For Japan’s Kamikaze fighters of World War 2, their service guaranteed death. We’ve all seen the newsreels of them buckling into their cockpits, kissing photos of their loved ones, and taking off to complete their mission. That mission was to fly their planes into enemy targets at the cost of their own lives.
Can you imagine what they must have been thinking in the hours up to and at that moment? What fear must they have felt? What could possibly drive them to volunteer their lives in such a heart-wrenching manner?
Purpose.
They had a fervent love for their nation and emperor. To these individuals, nothing could be more important than promoting and protecting those concepts including themselves. It was that sense of purpose that overcame even the fear of certain death.
Think of what it can do for you when the stakes are much less. Purpose overcomes fear.
Tip 2- Get Over Your Ego
Our ego is a false construct of our identity that each and every person develops to varying degrees over the course of our lives. It is a self-concept that values itself over anything else.
So much of humanity’s woes come from wayward egos out of control. Bosses lording control over their employees, outbursts of anger from being offended, or putting others down in order to feel better about oneself.
Simple Life Strategies’ Zoe B shares some great insight about ego in her article. She makes the case that ego desires to be in control and to be right. I like how she puts it this way:
“My personal take on the ego is that it’s the part of us that feels the need to be special. It’s that part of us that seeks approval – and by very definition it is a part of us that feels lacking in some way. This is why I know that the ego is not my friend.”
Because the ego is so wrapped up in furthering itself, you can see how fear can be associated so strongly with it. The ego generates a constant source of fear from the simple challenges that come its way on a daily basis. Here are just a few possible ways how:
- The ego doesn’t want to be associated with failure. (That could be one of the motivations of our lazy friends—if they never do anything they can’t fail and their ego doesn’t need to fear)
- Egos also don’t want someone else to look better than it. It’s a scary thing to have someone else show it up and steal the spotlight
- And an ego certainly doesn’t want to be exposed altogether and collapse its reign of power
But putting your ego in place is crucial to living more powerfully. In fact, it’s critical as one of the most freeing, empowering things a person can do to overcome fear in one’s life.
But it does take a real act of awareness to break through the facade and defeat it. Dr. Wayne Dyer’s book, Your Sacred Self—Making The Decision To Be Free and Eckhart Tolle’s,
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose are excellent resources to help you do just this.
When your life isn’t all about your ego—how you look, how others think of you, how YOU think of you—then much of your trivial fear will go away. You will be free to move forward in light of your authentic self.
Tip 3- If There Is Any Fear Left, Just Go
Nike developed one of the most famous marketing slogans of all time: Just Do It.
The message is clear—despite your feelings of adequacy as an athlete just go out onto the football field, or basketball court, or baseball diamond and just do it (of course wearing their clothing couldn’t hurt).
There is something incredibly motivating about freeing yourself from fear and just going for it. It’s an exhilarating sense and one that helps you feel truly alive.
That feeling comes not from the brand of clothes you wear but the influx of hormones released in the midst of fearful challenges. When you go, despite the fear, your own body helps you get through it!
Sarah Klein explains the effects of the three major stress hormones of adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine:
- “Along with the increase in heart rate, adrenaline also gives you a surge of energy”
- Norepinephrine improves focus and awareness to put you in better attack mode
- Cortisol helps your body to regulate important functions like blood pressure while you are dealing with your fearful task
So when you are at the tipping point of overcoming your fear, just do it. Step forward (in those shiny new sneakers) and tackle whatever challenge you are facing head-on. Your extraordinary endocrine system will be right there helping you through it.
Related: These Techniques Will Really Boost Your Courage
Take Away
Fear can really get the upper hand on us if we let it. And that’s what most of us do—we just let it.
But like so many things you can be empowered to overcome it.
I find it helps to identify the things we are afraid of and journal about them. I encourage you to do that too. No, it’s not a lame exercise. If you realized what your fears are costing you—what they are keeping you from—you would do a lot more than this to gain an advantage over them.
It costs you nothing except a few sheets of paper and a little time.
Get a little introspective and put forth your best honesty. Whether one thing comes to mind or twenty, write them down. Look at them in an objective light. Sometimes just seeing our fears written out in black-and-white is enough to give us the ability to question them.
Then take it a step further and write down the things that would likely happen if your fear was realized. You will find this to be a powerful method to put things into perspective.
Now, tackle them! One by one, work through the three strategies I’ve shared and watch them fall back in line. In little time at all, you will overcome your fear.
What’s your big childhood fear that you finally outgrew?
Aaron Force is a blogger from Seattle, Washington. He writes to help others find their purpose, get unstuck, and impact the world. These goals are important to him because these were all struggles that he faced himself and knew the frustrations of first-hand. In the spring of 2015, he experienced a spiritual calling that clarified these questions for him. It is his purpose now to help others find that same clarity so that they too may begin to “live their most powerful life.”
Aaron Force is a blogger from Seattle, Washington. He writes to educate others about the nature of an expanded consciousness to evolve humanity. Aaron unexpectedly experienced his own profound awakening and ego transcendence in 2015 and soon understood that the qualities of his own experience (a greater expansion and evolution in his life) could be applied to mankind collectively.