There’s nothing wrong with fear, the only mistake is letting it stop you in your tracks. ~ Twyla Tharp
Why is it so important to talk about fear? I previously spoke about Matilda the voice in our head that fear uses to warn us about dangerous things but more frequently overreacts to situations. This overreaction creates enough doubt in our minds to stop us in our tracks. Fear does not just stop us in our tracks it keeps us stuck there. And no amount of ignoring, spinning our wheels or busy-making will get us out.
Our distracted, frazzle-dazzle culture of busy-ness is fear doing its job. Fear’s job is to make sure we feel safe, don’t rock the boat, don’t cause a ruckus; in other words, do things that are infinitely easy. What happens when we try to do something a little hard, say, we want to change jobs, end a relationship, even lose weight? WHOA! says fear. Not so fast. Let me stir up some anxiety around that. That’ll stop you in your tracks." And sure enough, it usually does.
Fear will do whatever it takes to shut down any possibility of our reaching beyond the ditch it has us stuck in. Fear knows to hit us where it hurts. It will try to kill our desire to strive for our best life and realize dreams that require us to go beyond the parameters that it has deemed “safe.”
As if our own fear weren’t enough to stop us in our tracks, there are always other people ready to step in and ask “Who do you think you are?” Is there a person around you right now who would be more than happy to help you realize your worst fears? Finding ourselves on the receiving end of someone else's fear, limitation, and prejudice is something we can expect and not be surprised by.
It takes personal fortitude to go nose to nose with fear and feel disapproval, judgment, and sometimes even hatred from others and make hard, courageous decisions anyway. So, whether we’re battling our own fear or have someone else’s flung at us, we need a sense of our authentic worthiness to withstand it. Authentic worthiness equals courage. Mark Twain said courage is not the absence of fear and he’s right. Our culture tries to make us think that courage and fear are mutually exclusive by focusing on the result, on the current success, and not at the hard-fought journey, where fear was wrestled with daily to eventually get to the success. And while courage may not be the absence of fear, I would say that courage contains and restrains fear.
There are so many things we do that require us to balance fear and courage. Even when we learned to ride a bike, we struggled with the fear of falling and the very strong desire to master balancing on two wheels. Our courage battles fear all the time. It’s when we allow fear to stop us in our tracks with “Who do you think you are?” that we live small, stunted lives controlled by fear. At the end of the day, it isn’t how much fear you feel, it’s summoning up the courage to move forward in the face of that fear that counts.
C.O.R.E Studio CSS provides for mind/body/spirit fitness. To Find out more about getting out of our own way and get fit in all aspects of our lives visit getoveryourself.ca.
Ursula Cafaro
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