The statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke said,
“No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
Welcome to The Soul Podcast. I’m Stacey Wheeler.
Burke said those words nearly 300 years ago. They’re still true. But is fear bad?
After all, fear is an instinct. It’s a reflexive way we react to perceived danger. We can even say that keeping us alive is why it exists. When we’re in a life-or-death situation, fear is the hero. And we’ve all had life or death moments -even if we don’t think of them that way. If you’ve ever stepped into a boat from a dock, or stood on the edge of a cliff, you were one wrong step from danger or death. We’ve all had moments of quick response, where our pulse shot sky high, and we made a split-second decision -like when driving. And that split second was our fear response saving the day. That’s healthy fear.
And then there is unhealthy fear. Not the keep us alive one… the other one.
Unhealthy fear comes from “what-ifs.” Scenarios we play in our minds, which lead us to envision worst case scenarios in our lives. And these are usually things with no physical danger. It’s the things we have emotional thoughts around that we tend to get wrapped around. We’ve all known someone who struggled with a decision that would alter the direction of their life. Odds are, you have. I know I have. These are decisions that lead towards a change we hope will be good, but we fear might make our life less enjoyable… or worse. We hope for one outcome, but we fear another. And so often we don’t do anything. The fear makes us freeze. Dark thoughts drive these fears. And the thoughts can make us freeze. And we’re stuck. We can’t move forward.
You might think, “What if I ask her and she says ‘no’?”
The fear is that you will be rejected. Rejection will not harm you in any measurable way. No long-term damage. No cuts or scrapes. But many of us fear it just the same.
Maybe there’s a proposal you’d like to make at work… to make a change you think will be helpful. But you resist saying anything for fear they won’t like the idea.
(again – fear of rejection… see a pattern?)
Neither of these fears can lead to physical pain or death… it’s only a sense of failure. In other words, internal pain. The American writer Andrew Clements said,
“ …fear doesn’t need doors and windows. It works from the inside.”
It’s natural that fear works from the inside. It’s a deep, instinctual response to danger. It is our helper. Our friend. But it can become our enemy when we allow it to play scary thoughts on the screens of our imagination. Fear is meant for the big, life-saving jobs. But we assign it housekeeping tasks. It’s like having a pro athlete on your grade school team. Fear give’s it’s all when given a task. So we must be careful what tasks we give it.
When we play out all the “What-ifs”. When we linger on possible outcomes, we find new scenarios to fear. Our imagination paints terrible pictures in our minds. And we make decisions based on these pictures. “Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop.”
Fear is a beast that, when we feed it, becomes stronger. It is only in depriving it that we become stronger…. And fear becomes weaker.
Guess what? We’re all full of fear, doubts, and self-judgement. It may not seem that way but it’s true. We’ve all met someone who seems fearless. They’re not. When someone appears fearless, thers one of two things going on…
- They’re faking it -or-
- They’re standing up to their fears
When you act like you’re not afraid and push forward, you’re likely doing it out of fear of the judgement of other that you’re scared. You’re not doing it because you want to face you’re fears. You’re doing it because of a bigger fear driving you.
When I was a kid there was a boy named Joey in my neighborhood who would do the most outrageous things if you dared him. “Put a ‘kick me’ sig on the teacher.” Someone would say. And Joey would do it. “I dare you to steal a beer,” another suggested. And Joey would do it. Sometimes he got in trouble, but he’d nearly always take the dare. He and I were close enough friends that I also knew he was insecure. His homelife was tough and his father was very stern. He was forced to wear a military style buzz cut by his dad, which made him stand out. He took a lot of ribbing about this, and he had a deep fear of not being accepted by other kids. So, if someone dared him to do something outrageous, he’d do it. Because his fear of rejection was more frightening that his fear of pain or punishment.
Those who pretend, either become prisoners of their strongest fear (like Joey’s fear of judgement). By denying the underlying fear, they are suppressing it. They don’t challenge their fear, they pretend it isn’t there. They lie to themselves. They may not even understand what’s going on. All the while they seem terribly strong to those on the outside because what we see is them doing fearless things. But all the while they aren’t standing up to the thing that frighten them most.
There’s an old notion of whistling in the graveyard. When we act as if we’re not scared, when it’s normal we should be. When we act “as-if”… we are doing this for one of two reasons.
1. We don’t want to admit to ourselves we are. -or-
2. We don’t want to admit to the rest of the world we are.
It’s a workable model – for a while… but we’re lying to ourselves. And lying to ourselves keeps us from evolving. We can never become our best selves when we pretend, we don’t have fear.
We all have fear.
The best option is when we admit our fears to ourselves. We lean into them. We face them. And that’s where we can begin the greatest of our evolutions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.”
Nine years ago, I started (what I now recognize as a new leg of) my spiritual journey. And it really took off when I learned a simple secret that had been hiding in plain sight. When I moved towards fear, I always won. To be clear, I don’t mean fear of things like a guy carrying an axe handle on a dark street. That’s probably the kind of fear you should pay attention to and not go after. I’m talking about the fears created by stories in my mind. These are like a massive bucket of crabs that’s always with us, but we keep out of sight. The bucket is in our minds.
You see, I’d attended a weekend workshop recommended by a friend. In the handful of days I was there I’d pulled out and confronted fears… and I realized they were no longer in my bucket. This blew my mind. Because I suddenly realized I had the power to do that to any of my fears.
I decided to reach into that bucket and start pulling out my fears one by one. The results were amazing.
It turned out all I had to do was go after it. To test if my fear was real. And the fears would crumble. Back then, if someone had told me that idea I would have thought ‘Yeah, some people can do that. Not all of us.’ And if you’re thinking that, understand … that thought is coming from fear.
Fear hides in the dark places of our mind. Fear is the beast that becomes stronger when we feed it.
So, how do you weaken it? You stop feeding it. To all things there is an equal opposite. Instead of feeding the beast of fear, feed its light twin – hope. You do this by testing your fears. By moving towards them.
That’s all you must do. Pick one small fear and move towards it.
When I was in high school a kid named Ian decided I was a good target to pick on. He made up a nickname for me and taunted me. These seemed to be mostly for the benefit of his friends. I tried to ignore him, but he kept increasing his taunting. And it started get to me. School became less enjoyable. I’d avoid the halls where I thought he and his friends might be. I was intimidated because they were in a group. I continued to try and ignore him. But I felt humiliated that I’d allow someone to treat me that way. The story in my mind was “I am acting like a weakling.” But still fear kept me from acting. I was becoming angry and wanted to stand up to him. And my mind swirled with what would happen if I pushed back. But I’d had enough. I was done tolerating his abuse.
I’d been in one fight before and had my nose broken. So, I was fearful of another. But fear of pain was smaller than fear of humiliation. I started working with my older brother after school. Practicing fighting moves. Punching a pillow, reacting to jabs. I spent two weeks of Christmas break planning my move. I was going to stand up to Ian, even if it meant a fight. After weeks of his taunting and fearing his reprisals, I intentionally walked down a hall I knew he’d be. I was walking towards my fear. As I passed, he called me a name. I slammed him against a wall and held him there. His eyes were filled with fear. He didn’t expect me to stand up to him. I was ready for a fight. He’d never considered I’d push back. He was shocked. He made no attempt to fight back. In his eyes I could see the fear of what I might do. After a short time, a teacher stepped in and made me release him. ‘Don’t ever say another word to me” I said. He never again called me a name.
Now, this is not a great example because part of this danger was real. But the fear that was shutting me down was the one I created in my mind. The story I told myself kept me stuck in place -as I looked at dozens of possible scenarios for how it might play out if I stood up. Going after the physical bully is not what this is about.
But understand -Fear is a bully in the hallways of your mind. When you stand firmly the bully fades away.
So, I learned the lesson to go after young. But didn’t know that’s what I’d learned. Years later, at the weekend workshop I was reminded of the lesson in a more subtle way. I was shown the full lesson. Fear wasn’t only protecting me from physical danger. It was keeping me locked into fearful thoughts of things that could not physically harm me.
So, I reached into my bucket of crabs. I started with small fears. I had some fear of camping outside alone in the woods. So I packed up and went to the woods. I feared the judgements of strangers. So, I put on weird clothing or odd hats and went in public. And I found that id people were judging me, it didn’t matter. I was taking care of me. I was growing. No one said anything to me. If I read their faces I might conclude they had certain thoughts about me. But that was my projections, right?! So, why worry. No stranger ever said anything to me about my weird hats or clothes. If they had, it wouldn’t have mattered. They didn’t understand the exercise I was doing. Their words would only have been a judgment about what they thought I was about. Not really about what was happening.
As I pulled out each fear in my bucket, I released it. They I moved to larger and larger fears.
You see, we think our fears are walls. When we lean into those walls of fear, the walls fall. That’s because they were never really walls. They were just imaginary walls we construct in our minds. Fear is the architect. Insecurity is the builder.
When we push, each wall falls. And it frees us to move outside of the prison of fear we didn’t know we were living in.
And let me be clear. This not a new idea.
Around 3000 years ago Aristotle said, “He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.”
Around the same time Epictetus said,
“Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them.”
You see, it’s not the thing that is scary as much as how we perceive it. It’s the ‘what-ifs’ that scare us. It’s the stories our minds tell us. And this is true even with the smallest things.
Afraid to present an idea at work? Afraid to make the first move on someone you’re attracted to? It’s not because it’s dangerous. There’s no real danger. You won’t be injured or killed. Your fear comes from the story you tell yourself. It’s how you view it that scares you. The potential harm is nearly nothing.
Unhealthy fear can play in the background of our lives… affecting us in unacknowledged ways.
The most unfortunate part is that we may not notice how it’s effects our lives. That’s because it doesn’t take away what we have. It deprives us of what we might have if we faced our fears. When we don’t move towards fear, we’ll never know what we’ve missed.
Joseph Campbell said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Just the other side of fear … that’s where all the gold is. We can neglect it. We can leave it there. And we’ll be okay. We’ll get by. But we will never become the best version of ourselves, hiding from fear. We’ll never find our gold.
How many times have you resisted doing something because of fear? When we let fear guide us, we miss out. Fear tells us we can’t do it. It tells us people will judge us. That we’re not good enough or not smart enough. When we listen to our fear, we neglect our desires and hopes. “Fear steals our dreams.”
To make the point that this is a well-known idea, I will bombard you with quotes about it.
Rudyard Kipling said,
“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
Our fears make us lie to ourselves.
Jack Canfield said,
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
The gold is in that cave.
And we finish with good old Marcus Aurelius who said,
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
Fear does that. Fear keeps us from truly living. It keeps of from pursuing our dreams. And fear is not outside of us. It is inside of us. We created that beast. And we get to choose if we feed it. The way we stop feeding the fear is by embracing fear as a challenge. We do this by pushing down the walls of our perceived fear.
Consider rejection. Let’s say you get a no, instead of the yes you were hoping for. And maybe that rejection hurts you. But does it really? The affect rejection has on you is entirely dependent on how you interpret it. We only feel rejection when we take in someone’s action and assign meaning to it. So, you’ve not been hurt by the answer a person gave you. You’ve been hurt by the meaning you give to that reaction. Understand?
So, what do you say…? Ready to push back on your fears?
