3 Effective Ways To Deal With Your Fear

Ho w many of you reading this today are being held back in your life in at least one area because you don’t know how to deal with your fear?

For example…

• You have fear around your job or career that keeps you from saying or acting in a way you think is best for your company or business
• You are afraid of being alone, so you make compromises in who you go out with or who you are currently in a relationship with
• You are fearful of rejection, so you don’t even engage with friends or with possible relationships
• You are scared to follow a lifelong passion or dream because you have bills and responsibilities that require a paycheck now!
• You fear being put on the spot, you lack the confidence to react and so you avoid many situations in life you would really like to be part of

Do any of these sound familiar?

This is only a small sample of the fear that most of us live with every day, holding us back leading to frustration, sadness and overall anxiety in life.

Inside “Get Unstuck – 4 Part System For Getting Unstuck In Life” – there are examples where learning to unblock your life in the face of fear have led to massive achievements, incredible happiness and fulfillment…learning to deal with your fear is a powerful, freeing catalyst toward happiness and growth in your life.

So, what can we do to deal with your fear?

1. Face Fear – Don’t Ignore It

Trying to ignore your fears doesn’t work. What DOES work is making sure you are looking at situations objectively rather than with exceptional build-up of fear over what “may” happen – but usually does not.  I guess what I’m saying is that we all tend to create these vivid pictures/scenes in our mind of how things can go amazingly wrong feeding our fear instead of focusing on a) What could go amazingly right and b) Having confidence to handle anything else if it does happen to go South.  Ignoring fear simply allows it to grow and impact more and more of your life until you find yourself in crisis…you want to avoid that from happening.

2. Be Objective – Stop Building Up Fear

Have you ever noticed your self-talk around things that you fear.  You build intense, worst-case scenarios fueled by your imagination that frankly , would scare the hell out of anyone!

We are all film-makers (in a sense), creating complete screenplays and movie scenes in our minds of how bad it would be if we acted upon that which we fear.

So, what we have to learn to do quickly is to replace these “worst-case” movie scenes (complete with emotions, sounds, sights, etc…) with re-framed thoughts, beliefs and imaginations.

Best way I have found of doing this is to take time (either during meditation or even outside of meditation where you can concentrate) and a) Let all of your feels flow for 10 -min – write them down, let them exhaust themselves even if it takes a little longer and then b) Now pretend you are someone else looking down on the “old” you – this allows you to see a situation more objectively, as if it were happening to someone else.  This really helped me to put my fears into perspective over the last year

3. Take Action – Put Failure Into Perspective

Once you have faced your fear and re-framed the thoughts, events, situations and actions into a more objective context, go ahead and take action – even the smallest of actions – toward that which we fear.  If you are afraid of rejection by the opposite sex, simply engage someone in a 5-minute conversation and see that it’s not as bad as we think.   At the same time, you want to re-frame how we think of failure.  Assume we are rejected…instead of hanging our head in despair, lets learn why.  Was it that the timing was bad?  Perhaps you had little in common with the other person?  Could it just be something personal with that person…something going on in their life right now?  Perhaps you could improve your confidence or conversation…all things you control! In other words, view failure not as permanent, but as temporary setbacks that ALL people go through on the path to improvement.  Without falling off our bike, we can’t learn to balance.  Why is it any different in real life when we are adults?

Learning to deal with fear is a critical part of achieving happiness and success in life.  Tony Robbins once said, life is the dance between what we fear and what we want…let’s make that a happy dance instead of an unhappy one – that’s when you really achieve what you desire in life.