Finding Freedom From Fear

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror.  I can take the next thing that comes along.’  You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

                                          Eleanor Roosevelt

I’ve Been Thinking . . . how fear has impacted my life.

Several years ago a local community college contacted me to do a workshop on supervisory skills.  I immediately suggested they had the wrong person.  “I’m sorry,” I remember saying, “I don’t do public speaking.  I can’t even lead a silent prayer in a phone booth... by myself.”  The conversation ended and I figured that was the last I would hear from them.

Two weeks later, another call came to my office.  “Glenn, we would really like for you to do the program.  You work with personnel and we know you could offer a lot of insight.”  What I realized later is that they had probably called a half dozen other people who turned them down and I was the last one on their list.

“How long does the program have to be?” I asked.

“Two days.”

“Two days!  I don’t know ‘two days’ worth of information about anything.”

To make a long story short, I gave in.  The next few months provided considerable learning about the crippling effects of fear.  I had heard all of the clichés about fear like, “We have nothing to fear except fear itself,” or “Fear is interest paid on a debt you do not owe.”  Those were empty thoughts as I wrestled with my decision and attempted to write a workshop that I had agreed to do because I wasn’t courageous enough to say ‘no.’

It’s now thirty plus years later.  I’ve conducted a thousand seminars and keynotes to thousands of people, and learned that facing the fear head on allowed me to gain the confidence to not only speak in front of a group, but attempt other things I thought I couldn’t do.  In addition, I gained valuable insight into fear’s personality.

Fear Reproduces Itself.  The more I thought about doing the seminar, the more nervous I became.  In fact, those feelings carried over into other facets of my life that were normally in my comfort zone.

Fear produces hesitancy...which breeds lack of risk...which results in a lack of experience...which produces limited insight...nourishing the belief that we can’t do the thing we fear.  This cycle perpetuates itself until we create a string of negative thoughts that chain us to self-imposed limiting expectations.

Fear Breeds Inaction.  I had a substantial amount of material to write and organize to insure the workshop’s success.  Yet, I found myself daydreaming and worrying about the outcome of the program rather than digging in and getting the work done.

Jack Canfield rightly asserts that, “Fear keeps us from taking action, and if we don’t act, we never get beyond where we are now.”  When fear permeates your thinking, it becomes virtually impossible to push ahead and achieve desired results.  Once you allow fear to take control it generates a thousand reasons to procrastinate.  Unchallenged fear paralyzes.  John F. Kennedy suggested, “There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

Fear Snuffs Out Confidence.  Amen!  I started out with minimal confidence that I could pull off this public speaking commitment.  The self-doubt compounded and filtered into more areas of my life.

Norman Cousins said, “People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.”  Cousins made a critical point.  Fear isn’t necessarily bad, but when it controls you there are damaging consequences.  Fear is only as powerful as the extent we submit to it.

You can have all the talent in the world but allowing fear to be in control will squelch your belief in what you can do.  If you don’t believe you can do something, you will inevitably sabotage your own efforts.  It’s at this point fear becomes more powerful than our dreams.

Fear Keeps Us From Realizing Our Potential.  The only “potential” on my mind for several weeks was the potential public disaster and humiliation I was going to face.  Thinking about “being my best” took a back seat to thinking about “surviving.”

Fear-strapped people struggle to try new things, dream, excel, and produce beyond their current level of functioning.  They live in a relatively small box nailed together by insecurities and covered with the lid of fear.

Former NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton was undoubtedly acquainted with fear yet he achieved phenomenal success by learning to overcome it.  Tarkenton believes, “Fear causes people to draw back from situations; it brings on mediocrity; it dulls creativity; it sets one up to be a loser in life.”

Your hunger and passion for developing yourself is an important component to creating the drive to disarm fear’s power.  Blasting through our fears puts us in position to grow and develop.

Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed a novel and effective way of handling the fear of trying something new.  She suggested, “Anyone can conquer fear by first doing three things:  do it once to prove to yourself that you can do it.  Do it a second time to see whether or not you like it.  And then do it again to see whether or not you want to keep on doing it.”  Ms. Roosevelt believed that by the time you’ve moved through the third step, fear is extinguished.  What has changed?  Simply, you have handled the fear.

You probably noticed a common theme in this approach -- taking action.  There is no victory over fear by sitting in your favorite easy chair and attempting to wish it away.  In fact Dale Carnegie believed, “We generate fears while we sit; we overcome them by action.  Fear is nature’s warning signal to get busy.”

Notice that no one suggests you pretend fear doesn’t exist.  Just the opposite.  The first step in overcoming fear’s restrictive power is to acknowledge it.  Then, Fred Pryor suggests, “One of the best ways to conquer fear is to move toward it.”  When you find yourself submitting to fear’s temptations, remember that we tend to give our fears more power than they deserve.  By failing to confront them, we permit them to dominate our lives.  The answer?  Fears diminish and lose their control and power over you as you confront them.

Take your greatest fear and turn it into a motivator.  “The hero and the coward,” said boxing manager Cus D’Amato, “both feel exactly the same fear, only the hero confronts the fear and converts it into fire.”

What’s your fear?  If you have a fear of . . .

. . . failure -- you have kakorrhaphiophobia

. . . poverty -- you have peniaphobia

. . . responsibility -- you have hypengyophobia

. . . loneliness -- you have monophobia

. . . being looked at by other people -- you have scopophobia

. . . crowds -- you have ochlophobia

Turn your fear into a driving force for moving into uncharted territory.   You are stronger than your fears or you wouldn’t have made it this far.  Henry Ford once declared:  “One of the great discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.”

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- and possibly the boogey man.”

     Pat Paulsen