Being scared is the first step toward bravery
Embracing fear as a highway to self-knowledge
Fear is a funny emotion. It can sink you, or it can save you.
Say you're on the brink of a major life change: a career switch, a cross-country move, a promising marriage or desperately needed divorce. Your doubts and anxieties could become paralyzing, causing you to sail past, or sabotage, a gleaming opportunity.
But if you're afraid of walking down a deserted road at night or scared to enter a restaurant full of maskless patrons during a pandemic, dread could stop you in your tracks and guarantee your safety.
Luvvie Ajayi Jones has built a career on battling that first type of fear. The longtime blogger-turned-author and public speaker gave a 2017 TED talk titled Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, which urged listeners to speak truth to power and be true to themselves. (“Comfort is overrated, because being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they've been is comfortable, and all comfort has done is maintain the status quo,” she says in the talk, which is infused with an activist spirit. )
Her new book, Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-fighter Manual, is a how-to and a call to action, with dashes of memoir, challenging readers to do what scares them to improve their own lives and bolster the greater good. But make no mistake, Ajayi Jones isn't outlining steps to conquer or vanquish fear. That's impossible, she says.
In that spirit, here are two of Ajayi Jones's own fears.
Talking about her therapist's death: Ajayi Jones adored her therapist. In mid-january, Ajayi Jones was scheduled for a session. The day before, she learned her therapist had died. She was shattered. She wanted to speak publicly about her grief but felt uncertain. Would that be gauche? Inappropriate? Dishonourable?
“It was a moment where I was like, I'm afraid this might seem like it's about me,” she says, adding: “I'm afraid that somebody will see this and judge it.” Ultimately, that didn't stop her. “I'm stumped. I'm stunned. I'm gutted,” she wrote in a thoughtful blog post about her therapist's death. “Who helps you process the sudden death of the person who helps you process life?”
And learning to drive: For many, learning to drive is a rite of passage. For Ajayi Jones, it's a mountain to climb.
She's afraid of driving. Will she ever learn? “Absolutely,” she says. She's in fear-fighting mode.
We are all afraid of one thing or another — of trying and failing, speaking up and offending, of being vulnerable, or honest about what we want, or misunderstood. But here's the good news: Fear is the red-hot centre of bravery.
“The thing about courage is you can't have it without fear,” Ajayi Jones says. “You got to be afraid before you can have courage, because if you weren't afraid, it wasn't courageous.”