By Anita Garner
What could we do if we weren’t afraid?
Are we better off accepting our fear? Should we keep trying different ways to overcome it? Some advice about dealing with fear says acknowledge the fear, addressing it directly.
“Hello old nemesis. I see you there. I feel you too. Stay here if you want to, but I’ll be going around you to get to where I need to be.”
My brother and I had many conversations about the subject, coming from an unusual childhood where fear of doing/saying the wrong thing was ever-present. We wondered how much each of us should credit fear for the progress in our lives.
We looked at how many things each of us had learned to do and concluded that fear was a big motivator in much of what we’d achieved. Fear kicked our butts. Got us going.
Obviously fear is also paralyzing. I’ve been there too, and I wonder which is the more frequent result:
1) Fear causing us to run away from something before giving it a chance, or
2) Fear causing us to run toward something that turns out to be good.
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Fascinating topic.
Seems to me there are reasonable fears and unreasonable fears but all fear is rational. I may be playing word games, there, but I’ve known both reasonable and unreasonable fears I’ve respected and allowed to serve me. I fear motorcycles so I stay off of them. That’s reasonable. I also have the example you mentioned, the fear of speech-making, which is unreasonable because I’m actually very good at it but it’s still rational because it is real and it is mine. If I can avoid giving a speech I will and be very happy about the decision.
Well, I have so many fears on my “list of stuff that spooks me” that I’d be kind of hard pressed to list them in any kind of descending order. Having said that, I think the one that still causes me the greatest angst is the fear of having a golf umbrella pop open in my pants.
I don’t know of anyone else who shares that concern – but the way the guy plays his game – I suspect Tiger Woods never had it. Either that, or he let’s his caddy take the pop.
Meanwhile, I got a few more finger nails to gnaw on.
I was just doing the annual cleaning out of my desk drawer and found a little piece of paper I had ripped out of a book or magazine that applies to your comments about fear. Not sure who I am quoting but it says:
“I recently came across a study done at the University of Michigan that has helped me reduce the effect of fear in my life. This study determined that 60% of our fears are unwarranted, and 20% have already become past events and are completely out of our control. Another 10% of our fears are so petty they don’t make any difference at all. Of the remaining 10% of our fears, only 4 or 5% are real and justifiable. And, we can’t do anything about half of them! That means only about 2% of our fears are really worth thinking about, and we can solve them easily if we will simply stop stewing and start doing”