Let’s talk about how you can How to fear less and conquer your fears. Conquering fears is one of the most avoided actions in human nature. Conquering fear is also arguably the most necessary action in human nature. Fear is an emotion just like happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, and satisfaction. What makes fear so heavy as an emotion is the baggage that come with it. Fear is often loaded on our minds along with worry and doubt. Not just our own worry and doubt, but if you’re in the wrong crowd, then potentially theirs as well. Once fear kicks in, it affects how we feel about the actions we potentially will take. It makes us apprehensive.
Understand that our actions are determined by our thoughts and the emotions that stem from those thoughts. I wrote in my previous article, Your Subconscious Is Hearing You and It’s Obeying You, that our subconscious mind (which works as a memory bank for our past thoughts, experiences, feelings, and emotions) dictates our actions and behaviors based on stored habitual thinking that aims to keep us in a risk free comfort zone. It’s a fight-or-flight system that wants to protect us from harm by using past experiences and emotions as data for calculating our next moves. Therefore, the worry and doubt that fear brings, bleeds into our subconscious minds so deeply, that we are taking ourselves away from what we may perceive to be a harmful situation and may avoid making any progressive moves all together. It is important that we train our subconscious mind to work in our favor by replacing those previous negative thoughts, experiences, feelings, and emotions with positive ones that work in our favor that allow us to proceed with action.
In order to proceed with action, we must go through fear. All levels of fears are valid and how much each level weighs on our respective minds are relative. However much the level of fear weighs on your mind, you have to conquer that to proceed towards your goals. So, lets discuss five brave and practical steps you can take to conquer those fears.
1. Acknowledge Your Fears
Your emotions are valid, and you need to recognize them. You need to reflect.
Why you are having these feelings?
What upcoming event is making you feel a certain way?
Try to completely understand the situation you are in. Acknowledging your feelings is high form a self-respect. It builds courage and makes you more self-aware. When courage takes up space in your life, there is less room for fear. Choosing to avoid or deny the existence of fear in your life when it is present, will allow it to show up in different aspects of your life. Avoidance of critical conversations at work, failing to speak up for yourself in class, and one-sided draining relationships are some of the ways the denial of fear can affect your life. Acknowledge fear by admitting to yourself the situation that you are in is scary or daunting. This is good because this acknowledgement triggers your internal fight-or-flight system that heightens your senses of awareness, thoughts, emotions, and consequences of your next actions. For your convenience I created a FEAR Less worksheet for you fill out and work through.
2. Mentally Confront Your Fears
Before you proceed with action cold turkey, it is beneficial to get in a good warm up to the situation at hand. Visualize yourself in your situation.
For the best results of this exercise, I recommend doing this in a meditative state with no distractions around.
Now fully immerse yourself in the situation you are facing. If it’s a conversation, imagine the setting it will take place in, the person or people that are involved, and the content of what need to be discussed. If it’s a presentation or speech, imagine you on your platform and the audience you will be addressing. If it’s a career move, visualize yourself transitioning from where you currently are to the position that you are going to be in.
Once you have visualized the situation, play the situation out in your head like how you would want it to play out. Replay the best-case scenario over and over, imagining what you are going to say, how others will respond, or the best results from the moves you make.
After you have visualized the best-case scenarios, imagine the alternatives and how you would respond. This is a contingency plan to prepare yourself for your own reaction in case these scenarios come into fruition.
With the contingencies plans in place, come to out of your meditative state or whatever position you are in, and write down the best-case scenario ideas that you plan to follow. This allows you to start materializing your thoughts.
3. Build Your Confidence To Act On The Situation
Now that you have mentally visualized the plan to conquer your fear, it time to put in some physical work to believe you can execute. Practice the conversation that you need to have out loud. Practice the speech or presentation you need to execute out loud. I recommend doing this in the mirror so you can see how you look and practice how you want to react to all the scenarios you previously visualized. You can even get a boost of confidence by practicing in front of a friend or family member to receive their constructive feedback. If it is a career move, research online community groups with likeminded members who discuss their moves throughout the forums and threads. Read employee or consumer reviews of the position or industry you will be working in. Go to YouTube university and watch others who are in the position or industry you are going to be in. Putting into practice what you will be doing is going to allow you to face the situation like an improv rehearsal which is going to allow you to be more free in your approach.
4. Proceed To Act Without Hesitation
By this point you have given yourself the most self-respect by acknowledging your fear related feelings, you mentally put yourself into the shoes you are about to walk in, and you physically prepared to give yourself the confidence to execute.
Now you have to proceed without hesitation. You’ve done enough thinking to prepare for what you want and the contingencies for alternative outcomes. NOW GO!
Give yourself credit because you have reached not only the most important step in the process of conquering your fear, but you have also reached the bravest step. You should be proud of yourself. You built the courage to act and accept the consequences. YOU ARE CHOOSING TO DEFEAT FEAR! This is how you fear less and conquer. Fear responses like an increasing heart rate and sweaty palms are natural and sometime uncontrollable, but choosing to not act because of fear is a choice, especially when you put in the necessary effort to execute. You are choosing to try. You will lose out on 100% of the opportunities you don’t take. You already visualized the worst you could possibly imagine, now go execute and be proud of yourself for putting in the effort.
5. Keep Your Momentum
Once you go through with your plan of action, you have reached a very important and critical stage to fearing less and conquering your fears. If you do something once, then you can do it again and again. Like riding a bike, once you learn how to handle your fears, you will always know how to approach future situations with enough practice. The more you attack your circumstances head-on making room for courage in your thought process, the less room you will have for fear in your mind. So, it is important to continue building on your experiences and keep your momentum.
Understand fear won’t ever completely go away. In fact, some form of fear is necessary for human survival. The same fight-or-flight system that is triggered by fear also keeps up out of harm’s way and dangerous everyday situations. When we become fearless, what we are really doing is fearing less and controlling how we want to feel about the actions that we have to take.
Use fear to propel you to the goals you have set for yourself because you aim to conquer them. One at a time. When you build your fearless attitude, know that you are going to run into fearful situations, but you have to be aware that that you have defeated fear before and you can do it again.
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