How To Overcome Your Fears
And why it is so important
We all have fears.
Some are easy to overcome and some will be more challenging and will take us more time.
Fear can paralyze, can make you act as you will never act unless you had this fear or sometimes even lead to addiction.
Despite our fears affecting our responses, we are not only our fears.
Dealing with fear, small or big, is essential for our well-being and self-esteem.
At the beginning of this year, I shared a list of 25 things I am going to do this year.
There were two items I knew it will be a big challenge for me to take off this list - eating snails and experiencing extreme activity.
Simply because those two items represent some of my oldest fears.
So how could I do it anyway? How I could overcome those fears?
Well, I am a person who likes to have a meaning.
I like symbolic things.
So if you want me to do something, stick to it meaning and I will jump aboard. Literally.
And as a person who likes symbolic things, I convinced myself eating a snail will be a milestone for me.
It will be a great sign of me moving on and putting my old life behind and accepting the new version of myself.
Doing a zip-line over the river was a bit different. My friend sticks a meaning to it for me when he saw I was about to turn around.
Knowing me, he transforms it into something I could understand and want to do.
He changed the way I was looking at this by sticking a meaning to it, a purpose.
“Jumping means you are throwing away your past to this river and you are coming out clean on the other side. It means purifying, new start.”
You see, when the year started, everything in my life changed.
I started a new relationship, quit my job, and relocated to a new city.
I wasn't completely happy with all of those changes, but I haven't done much to change things either and maybe make some better.
Jumping over this river was so symbolic to me, I couldn't ignore it.
Things had to change.
I had to start facing my fears one after the other.
One month after, I came back home. And things change.
I start dealing with the biggest fear in my life at this point.
A fear which was buried so deep under hundreds of layers.
A fear which lived inside me ever since I was a child.
A fear which burst out only in the last year in the ugliest way I could ever imagine.
A fear which almost leads me to be self-destroyed.
I start to confront this fear with professional help.
Eating snails and jumping on a zip-line above the river feels easy as pie compared to dealing with this one.
It is a long process.
Some things are more complex and can’t be fixed overnight.
What is important is to be aware and work on it often, until one day this fear will disappear (or at least shrink into a size it won’t disturb me anymore).
For months I struggled to get to the core of the issue.
I struggled to understand what is it that paralyzed me and made me act like a person I can’t even recognize.
Like a person I don’t want to be.
Since I couldn't put a name on it, I didn’t know how to deal with it.
I came back home and I found myself sitting on a therapist’s couch. There it hit me, that thing I have, it calls fear.
“A Problem Well-stated is Half-solved.”
- Charles F. Kettering
Through personal experience, I have learned there are many ways to overcome a fear or a phobia.
Ever since I have applied them to myself, I feel a big change in my life.
Those days I am mastering hypnosis as one of the methods of overcoming fears and phobias.
Facing your fears
Running away from your fears is defiantly not going to help you to deal with them or to make them go away.
Facing fear can make your life easier, your self-esteem higher, and prevent a possibility of addiction.
And as said before, A problem well-stated is half solved.
Talk about it
Sharing your fears will help you realize you are not the only one who has that fear.
Solidarity can be important to many of us.
Recognition of the fact that fear is legitimate and there is always a way to overcome it.
It is important to accept the fact we are not only our fears.
Most people tend to intensify their fear, which tends to paralyze them.
Have a positive approach
Some of us suffer from something called “Catastrophic thinking.”
Meaning our minds is tend to object to us the worse images. (Read here how to stop it)
It is crucial to embrace a positive approach while dealing with fears (and for life in general).
Since our subconscious doesn’t know to separate emotionally between what we imagine and what really happens.
We can use that tool to convince our mind we already overcame the fear by imagining we really did.
It is vital to feed your mind with positivity consistently.
Find your motivation
It can be a book, a movie, a person, or anything else you can think of.
Use any resource you got without thinking twice.
Surround yourself with great motivation, which will remind you why you doing this and help you to keep going.
Do not hesitate to ask for help
I have been asked many times why I have seen a coach or why I am going to see a therapist.
My answer is always the same -
Why carry for the rest of your life something that can be fixed in an hour?
“And what if it comes back?”
Well, Do it again. If it helped before, it can certainly help again.
I have been trying Hypnosis as a method to solve an issue I had in my life and let me tell you, it improved my life in such a shocking way that I have decided to master it myself.
So very soon, I will be able to help others, the same way I got the help myself.
“The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
