It’s Time To End Your Fears!
“The caves you fear, holds the treasure you want.”
Fighting our fear is one of those things we have tried multiple times, but we have lost count of how many times we failed. In one of my recent blogs, I talked about my learning from Batman, wherein in the section, I suggested people expose themselves to their fears and fight with their fears, which will eventually make them stronger than they are currently.
But the question is how to fight your fears. Well, the answer to this question lies within you. We can use some psychological tricks to make the process a bit more smooth, but in the end, you are responsible for your fight.
Recently I was checking my new PR (personal record)of long distance run and while I was in the marathon with my past self record It stared to rain and as usual my shitty mind starts to trick me and said “Rudra, you are scared of lightening. move back to your home we will deal with this later.” and some more words like that which make me feel weak and liberalizing it “that’s ok you don’t have to be the strongest person” and that’s where I started to know that my mind is tricking me I am scared of lightening and I am tired and all other stuff. My brain will use this to make my self feel weak and soon I got the thought that I am tired and the food I ate was not good and more excuses like this. For instance That day in the rain and lightening sky I achieved two things: 1) my new PR of 18km (80mins). 2) And successfully defeated the fear of lightening. How did I do that?
I would like to share five rules I use while fighting my fear (when I am on the battleground).
1,2,3 Rule
This rule is one of those golden rules which can be applied anytime, anywhere to any problem or fear or where you have to fight with yourself. Multiple times we are right in front of our fears and we want to fight, but we lack motivation, or you can say willpower, we are not able to do so and that’s the place where this rule comes into place.
When you are in front of your fears in your mind, there are tonnes of questions and problems troubling you. At that moment, you just have to count to 123 and jump to the ground. While I was fighting my fear of public speaking, I got this golden opportunity where I got the chance to host my school’s annual concert. I used this trick in the audition for the show where I had to engage an audience of roughly 50 people I used this rule and, thankfully, my audition went well and I hosted the annual concert with an award for the best host of 2021.
The Worst-case Scenario
Whenever I feel like I have a fear of failure or losing something, I start to imagine the worst-case scenario. What is the worst thing that can happen? And I started to prepare myself mentally for that scenario. As I prepare myself, I start to lose the fear. This gives me one of the most important lessons of my life:
“confidence comes from preparation”.
The more you prepare for a particular thing, the more you will be fearless, and the more you are fearless, the greater your chance to win. While I was in the run the worst case scenario was that I will not be able to complete my run and will be laying down somewhere under a shad waiting my breathing to get a bit normal so that I can call my brother to pick me up.
The worst case scenario is also a decision-making hack you should use while making big decisions in your life. By big decisions, I mean things that create a huge impact on your daily life. For example, moving out of your parents’ house or shifting your full-time career from a 9–5 job to a content creation business, etc. This is because it consumes a huge amount of time, which is not good to invest in small decisions.
Imagine yourself in a happy place.
For every person, there is a place or a situation that makes them happy, but we cannot access that place or that situation at any time, so the best potential solution I recently came up with is to visualise the happy place.
In the beginning, you will struggle a lot while visualizing, and you will feel that all this is bull shit and it is not practical, but believe me, as you practise more, you will become an expert in this and you will see its benefits in terms of fighting your fears.
Simply envision the outcome when you are struggling to find your inner drive. Simply envisioning the eventual product will fill your brain with motivation that knows no bounds. The best aspect of this motivation is that you may use it on your own; you don’t need to rely on someone else to motivate you.
Now it doesn’t mean that you start to escape from your reality through visualization. It is for the time when you lost the hope to complete you goal of fighting your fear.
Return to the fundamentals.
When I was a small kid, I used to be scared of the dark (I think most of us feared the dark when we were younger), but as we grew up, we learned why it is dark somewhere, and the answer is pretty simple. The absence of light makes the place dark. To be more specific, the absence of photons makes the place dark. As we go deeper and understand the topic, we lose the fear, because we always fear the unknown. If we know the thing, we are fearless.
Return to the fundamentals by asking why things are the way they are. How does it operate? Why is it there? Some of these basic questions will help you understand the fear better. If you say you fear dogs, then as you know more about your fear, you will understand that you are not afraid of dogs, you are afraid of dog bites (pain) and similarly you will know that exactly who and why you are afraid of.
Bring it up on a regular basis.
If you are scared of dogs but in your friend’s circle everyone has a pet dog in their house, eventually you will lose the fear of dogs because you are talking and meeting them frequently. If you talk about any topic on a very frequent basis, then you will lose fear and interest in the topic soon, but if you avoid talking about that topic, your fear will stay in your mind.
One of the common mistakes people make is that they start to avoid conversation on that topic and make it a taboo topic for themselves and also sometimes for their family members, but clearly this is a wrong approach. You have to do it regularly to genuinely lose the fear of that particular thing.
For example, when I first learned about the internet and more than just the internet, when I learned about the dark web and deep web, it was depressing for me, and it is a depressing topic for everyone. But after that, I know I’m going to want to talk about it a lot because it’s a reality in our world that I have to accept it in order to function properly on the internet. So I started to talk about it in my friend circle and even with my brother too, so that I could normalise it as soon as possible.
