How To Face Your Fears

There are many reasons why we should face our fears. Letting our thoughts, decisions, and feelings be driven by fear, we lose the ability to reach our full potential.

It’s nearly impossible to take the types of risks that enrich your life when your very existence revolves around fear. It robs you and you become a slave to fear.

But you can never truly escape fear, nor should you want to. Fear protects us from real dangers. It only becomes a problem when it’s an obstacle to our growth and development.

It will always be a part of your life and running away only gives you the illusion of safety.

For example, fearing change is futile. Our lives are constantly changing and not accepting this stunts you and keeps you from proactively leading your life.

And because change is inevitable, it’s a waste of time and energy to try and avoid it.

Living in fear means that:

We struggle to act and take the steps we need to reach our goals.
Focus on the negative, and worst-case scenarios.
Feeling worthless.
We are giving up on doing many of the things we dream about.
Give up our power.

So, how do you overcome your fears?

Fortunately, there are several ways to learn to feel the fear without allowing it to take over your life. You can take steps to become a more fearless person and you’ll be the happier for it when you realize that you can finally live life on your own terms.

Take Risks and Do What Your Heart Desires

It’s not easy to face our fears, it’s easy to say, “just do it”, but not easy to do. Unfortunately, if we don’t take risks, we lose out on many of the things that we

want to do. Visualizing the type of life, you want, and the type of person you want to be is the first step toward conquering your biggest fears.

Act As If Failure Is Not An Option

Or at the very least, reframe your ideas about failure. Every time you try something new or take a chance, you become bolder. You also get closer to your goals. Mistakes are inevitable, see them as the learning experience they are.

Learn to Relax When Fear Arises

There are many ways you can calm yourself. Meditation, listening to soothing music or calming exercises. I have one I share with my clients.

Substitute Fear With A Positive Experience

Instead of focusing on the fear, visualize a positive experience. Changing your mindset is a powerful way to refocus your mind.

Think of a Fear You Have Overcome

There have certainly been times when you’ve gone ahead and taken a chance, and overcome fear. The best way to change your beliefs is to focus on your successes.

Recognize Your Fears

Change your relationship with fear by recognizing it when it appears. It’s possible that fear has been such a big part of your life, that you may not even notice it when it comes up. Sometimes fear appears as resistance to something, other times it’s self- talk which convinces you that something is impossible, so you give up.

Observe those fearful thoughts. Some common ones are:

I’ll never learn how to do that!
Someone else can do a better job than I can.
People will laugh at me.
I’m not good enough/smart enough/attractive enough.
That’ll never work

Reprogram Your Fearful Thoughts

Now that you know what your fear looks like, acknowledge it and change the thought around.

If you start to think that, “I’ll never learn to do that”, replace it with, “I’ve learned more difficult things, I’m sure I can learn to do this too!”.

Reprogramming your thoughts allows you to take control of your fear and process it in a way that enables you to move forward.

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