How I took control of my FEARS
Let’s kill all the fears dwelling inside and break the boundaries of our experiences.
Fear in humankind developed as a survival instinct. Thousands of years ago without fear, survival was hard but as the evolution progressed our survival is at comfort whereas fear is at its peak. The feeling of fear which was supposed to help us survive in the wild now has turned into a different kind of fear that restricts our experiences.
Fear is common among us, I fear something and you may fear others and it can be clearly seen that it’s rooted in human behavior. Fearing a hungry lion right in front of us is a different kind of fear than the fear we all experience in the modern-day world. People now bread fear from imagination rather than realistic circumstances.
Fear of failure, embarrassment, pain, sadness, and opinions are some of the finest examples of fear that we bread nowadays. These kinds of fear restrict our experiences and hence provide no space for growth.
I used to fear too, I feared opinions (what others would say), failures, public speaking, and many more. It’s not that I don’t fear anything these days but I have taken control of all my fears and now can calmy perform what I couldn’t due to fear. Fear limits us and taking control of these fears has helped me achieve new heights, learn new things, experience new feelings, and do what I hesitated to do. Now no opinions can pierce through me, I like failing because I learn from them, I teach and overall I am more confident in being me.
Taking control of my fears is the best thing I have ever done, it makes me feel more alive.
The way I approached fears might help you too to take control of your fears and achieve new heights.
The most classic suggestion for tackling fear is “If you fear something, do it”. Let me tell you it’s not as simple as that. If you fear public speaking and you follow this suggestion you will be standing in the center of a crowd holding a mic and sweating with nervousness, I bet you won’t even be able to utter a sound. If you fear failure and follow this suggestion and build that business anyway, you won’t be able to go that far because the fear of business failure will keep you occupied and when occupied by that how would you build a successful business.
To take control of my fears I first started by analyzing what fears actually were, and how they come. As I began producing different video content I understood that the fear of opinions came from the way I thought. My thinking pattern literally determines the way I feel. I fear it because I think that way.
Fears originate in the part of the brain and except for the survival instinct we are responsible for the imagination of scenarios that induce fear within us. Fears like this come from the imaginations that our brain processes and if you imagine getting scared about the audience you are about to speak to then it’s natural to feel that and get nervous. Instead, if you imagine a confident self, delivering a speech to the audience the fear automatically comes down boosting your confidence.
Fear is just our brain trying to keep us in a comfort zone by processing different imaginations that don’t even have a 10% probability of happening in reality. You fear because you imagine a circumstance that gets worse and worse, moreover the circumstances that you imagine have very little probability to come true, but the same imagination induces fear, killing all the confidence and bringing down morale. The same imagination stops you from moving forward and experiencing. That’s how fear works, it plays with the brain and we surrender to it.
The day I realized that fear was just my brain playing games with me it was not hard to take control of my fears.
Instead of imagining a nervous self in front of a huge audience, I started imagining a confident me. Instead of imagining and overthinking what others would think, I started imagining myself providing values. Instead of imagining what it would be like if I failed, I started imagining what things I would learn even if I failed. Instead of imagining bad circumstances, I started imagining good circumstances.
All it took was one simple shift in my thinking pattern to take control of my fears and build confidence.
Do you want to take control of your fears?
- Understand that fears are just what your mind makes up with imagination.
- The things you imagine have a very small probability of coming true but they will change the way you respond, fearfully.
- One simple shift in thinking patterns can kill the fearful feeling and boost your confidence.
Thanks for reading. If you like my work, please buy me a Ko-fi as I am currently unable to earn from the medium. Your appreciation means a lot.
