Fear, fear of rejection, fear of success, fear of failure, fear speaking up, fear of just omnipresent. Fear is all the time in our lives and we want to weigh it down and we want to repress it with. We don’t want to hear it. And you know that is the perfect recipe to make our fears grow. We will try to repress fear, it just grows out of proportion. Fear is part of our makeup. It is part of how our brain works. It is part of our life. Instead of repressing it, it is more productive to face your fears. Invite them into our life. Think of your fears like member of your mental board of directors in your mind. Invite them so that they could tell you everything; everything that could go wrong, everything that you could be afraid of. And something incredible will happen, you’ll get into the action that you are so terrified of.
You see it is very simple. When we do our worst case scenario analysis of what you would like to do (and don’t dare) vs the one of not taking action. In other words, you will contrast the worst case scenario of your dream vs the worse case scenario of regret. 100% of the time it is more tolerable to get into the risk of who you truly are in comparison with that of becoming the shadow of who you are meant to become.
Imagine you want to set up a company. You go through the whole scenario of trying that out. You go and look for funding and get a product and you sell and you grow and you get a partner and somebody defrauds you, somebody steals from you, some financial crisis happens and you go bankrupt. That’s the worst that can happen. You can deal with that.
And the other scenario, you always wanted to set up this company but you keep leaving it for later, later, later. In other words, you don’t really ever take action. Who did you become? A pawn for the dream of somebody else.
Whenever you have a fear, it’s a unequivocal sign that you have the opposite, you have a dream, a desire. And when you invite this fear to the table to speak up and you say we’re going to exactly do what you’re afraid of, you conquer that fear and you become stronger. In fact, you will think afterward if I can do this, what else can I do?
So, of course, you’re going to ask me, yes Blanca, that sounds just so lovely but how do I actually implement that? How do I actually conquer my fear?
You have to take a it tiny little step, tiny little step at a time. And you know what is a really cool thing, is that all these fears are connected. And when you prove one of these fears wrong, the other ones start trembling. Start with the tiniest of actions.
The other day my husband told me that he was going to buy jelly. And believe it or not, I was afraid because every time that I tried to make jelly before, it just didn’t come out right. But I was thinking this way, I’m going to change my fears and I’m going to do exactly what my fear told me not to. Doing a quick worst case scenario exercise. The worst that could happen if I did it was that we all didn’t like the jelly. In the other hand, the worst that could happen if I didn’t do it was to keep believing that I cannot do something as stupidly simple as this.
So, exactly because the jelly all the time went wrong, this time I’m going to try again. And you know what happened? It came out great and it was so easy. And after the jelly episode, I really felt great. If I can do this, what else can I do? I was so enthusiastic that I went back to my business and I reviewed some financial issues that we had and I got myself into that complex tax question. You know Dutch taxes in Dutch language. That was very difficult for me to wrap my head around it. Well, I figured it out. Because the first fear that was so silly – getting the jelly done – allowed me to get that tax question dealt with. After I did that one, I felt on top of the world. And I will take a more complex fear on and then I will take another more complex fear on.
So every time that a fear, even if it is tiny like you cannot make jelly, take it on, grab it and do it. Face your fears. When you do it, you will see that your muscle of self confidence, self efficacy will get stronger. And the more self belief you have, the smaller your fears will be. You see, your fears will not leave you because this is a conditioning for the rest of your life. You’re going to be in this gym of training your self confidence, training your self reliance forever. You will never get it done, and you know that’s great because the moment when you stop this process is actually when you will start dying. I hope for you that when you are 70, 80, 90, 100, you keep saying “Fear, I’m going to conquer you and I want to learn this and I want to learn that because I’m not planning to stop living, I’m not planning to stop learning, I’m not planning to stop growing.” So fear, here we go.
Face your fears!
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Also, please comment here below. I would love to hear from you what moved you. I would love to know how you will be using these ideas for that nasty fear that keeps stopping you. Share with us how you face your fear.
And I say goodbye reminding you to be all in.
Featured image by Chloe Lim
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