STRATEGIC APPROACH
IN MY last column I talked about the need to recognise where you are in your life and to keep asking the question: “Is my response working for me?”
A recent discussion had me thinking about why some people answer this question in the negative but keep repeating the same behaviours – and constantly find themselves back in a negative behavioural circuit.
Why is this? I feel it has a lot to do with understanding and dealing with our fears.
The only way to do this, in my opinion, is to enter that place where we fear to go but which holds the rewards we are seeking – our souls.
We need to go into our souls, understand the whys and whats of our fears, and then do something to address them.
Here are some clues as to how to address our fears:
Understand the nature of fear. Fear is a garden-variety human emotion. It is a natural and, at times, healthy emotion.
Fears are thoughts and feelings that we all carry around with us. Fear for ourselves, our family, our friends and the world.
But that’s all they are – thoughts and feelings. They are not real! If we can understand this, we can start to address them.
The question is, how do we face our fears rather than let them determine the course of our lives? Name your fear. The first step of facing our fears is to name them. What exactly are you afraid of? Public speaking? Intimacy with another? The loss of your job or of a relationship. The loss of financial security? Death? Illness? Spiders?
Visualise your fear. Disassociate yourself from the emotion generated by your fear and just look at it! Naming it can assist in dealing with it.
Explore the source of your fear.
Why are you afraid? Is it because of some past emotional wound or childhood experience?
One of the best ways to discover what it is that makes us afraid of something in particular is to get in touch with our feelings or associations related to the thing that is causing us fear.
Have you experienced a terrible pain in the past that you haven’t dealt with yet?
Are you still coming to terms with an event and haven’t allowed yourself to deal with it? For example, have you had a bad experience making a speech and now are absolutely terrified of making the same mistake?
If so, you can explain why the fear exists and now can start to make plans about how to deal with it. Often the first step for dealing with fear is to forgive yourself.
Ask. It is highly unlikely that anyone reading this article has never experienced or held fears.
We all experience it. Sometimes we think we are the only one who ever had this fear and secretly harbour our emotions. Yet sharing your fears with people you trust may generate a conversation as to how other people have handled fear.
Sometimes the answers will amaze you. People who have a fear of public speaking are often surprised to hear that even though I may speak in public two to three times a week, I still have some fear-based emotions – but I have strategies to positively manage this fear.
Have the courage to ask and you may get real strategies to use.
Bravery. Visualise a time when you did something that you would call brave.
Chances are you felt alive. Really alive. In those situations, you stepped out of your “stagnation zone” (or your comfort zone) and operated in your thriving zone.
See you did it! What did you learn from this to take into your next challenge?
When you do something brave, you’ll discover that the thing itself really wasn’t as scary as you had made it out to be; and you’ll feel proud that you did the thing that made you afraid.
Remain calm, focus and keep going.
Rule number one, two and three when addressing your fears is don’t panic! Remain calm, focus on your breathing, get in control of your thoughts and focus on addressing one part of the fear process.
Remember to be nice to yourself when you are facing these fears. You may be are changing a lifelong behavioural pattern. It’s okay to have fears and it’s okay to keep trying to master them.
It’s not okay to give up as you are giving away the opportunity to have a happy, fulfilled life.
Remember Winston Churchill’s advice that when you are going through tough times, keep going.
So enter your soul, address your fears and get that life you want and deserve.