Mastering Fear

What is fear and what is it doing to you? Conquering your fears is possible, & doing so will lead you to greater achievement than you ever thought possible.

Fear is a learned emotion, a learned behavior that we are not born with. Just think about our little humans — they are not afraid until we start telling them to “watch out” or “be careful” or “this can hurt you”; and even then they often don’t know what we really mean until they experience it. Like putting your fingers on the hot stove for example. Ah — but with that example you don’t necessarily need to walk away with fear. You have just overcome a little obstacle, made an experience, learned from it (I hope) and you can be 1. grateful, 2. not do it again, 3. walk away with respect for “hot”.

In other words: you’ve made up your mind, experimented by following your gut, learned and: GREW!

That, to me is the key thing.

Just today I was mentioning to someone that usually when we experience the sensation of what we call fear it’s because we are facing an opportunity to grow. After all, most of the time we are afraid of what is possible, not what is impossible because we know where we are and that is often within the limitations of our mind and the world we created.

So whenever I feel a sensation of fear – and I prefer to call it discomfort – I know I have a great opportunity to grow, to evolve, to move forward. The key is that as long as we’re comfortable I don’t believe we are learning much. We may be mastering our current skill set, fine-tuning it but we’re not expanding our skill level. This happens very often because we lack self confidence or are worried about the outcome — we are attached to the outcome. (This attachment is another blog in itself but I wanted to mention it here.)

So if you are willing; take a look at the times that you felt fear. When was it, who was involved, what triggered it?

You will likely find that the common denominator was: discomfort.

You met someone new and this person was very confident or very straight forward asking you questions and sharing stories; you were offered an awesome opportunity but you were not sure you could perform….

These are some of the examples I have seen.

Just recently I had a marvelous demonstration of fear, I believe (and I may be wrong). This was the fear of growing, evolving, and most of all the fear of collaborating and accepting help. It’s almost funny to see but much more it’s sad, to me.

Here was a person who has achieved a lot, paved the way for many, and this person was afraid. It felt better for this person to stick to the current knowledge and skill level, the current level of not receiving than to be open minded and overcome the limitations of the mind and social conditioning.

If there’s fear, there’s competition, there’s worry.

If there’s no fear, there is collaboration, there’s trust.

If there’s fear there’s… a lack of self-confidence and a lack of understanding that we’re all one.

So, fear can hold us back from evolving — which means it’s hindering our growth, our learning, and our expansion. This is especially true in business, of course, but also in our personal lives. If we are limiting learning, receiving, and are afraid of competition we will usually remain small. For some of us that is a perfect place to be. We are content in that place. That is perfectly fine. But for some of us we still long for more .. we know there’s more for us to do but we can’t get there. Then we are unhappy and the root of that unhappiness is: ourselves.

Fear can also teach us, allow us to take risk, receive help — which means it’s helpful for our evolution, for our expansion, and for our balance. If we understand fear as a learned emotion designed to keep us within certain parameters then we understand that facing and overcoming a fear can only lead to higher levels of success and to higher levels of Oneness. Why? Because there is no worry about competition, there is no worry about “not enough”, there is no worry about not being good enough … there just is BEING.

Again — think about your fears… are they helpful or hindering? What is your choice in dealing with your fears? It’s a choice as fear is a learned behavior… you can learn and unlearn a behavior…

What’s your choice?

Reflect a little … see where you are and know that wherever you are is PERFECT for you right now. Don’t judge yourself regarding where you are… just BE with it and then choose… choose your path every day … now you just know what fear really means so .. don’t be afraid. And mostly, to paraphrase Marianne Williamson: do not be afraid of your own power.

Written by Natalie Forest