How to get rid of fear
How to move through fears and step into empowerment and courage
Fear is a normal part of living
There's no one that hasn’t experienced fear. We all have it. It's a standard part of living.
And we all have two options with our fear.
We can become afraid of our fear, we can avoid it.
We can say to ourselves that I'm not going to do anything that allows me to experience the fear.
But this is the worst route to take as this is where our comfort zone shrinks.
This is a gateway to more anxiety, more depression and to a lower self-worth because we don't overcome the things that we're afraid of.
Think of fear as like a wall between you and the things that you want.
A lot of people see that barrier and they say, well, I won't do that because I'm afraid of it. And they use fear as decision-making criteria.
Anything that I'm afraid of, they're the things that I won't do.
‘I'm afraid of that. So I'm going to move away’
‘I'm afraid of that. So I'm going to plan a little bit more’, which is just a fancy way of procrastinating.
See fear as the work we need to do
We need to realize that this is the thing for us to move towards.
Why?
Because one of our jobs here is to release the fear that we have inside us and the only way to do that is by doing the thing that we're afraid of. It's to face the fear.
Susan Jeffers wrote a really great book on this called "Feel The Fear & Do It Anyway".
What she talks about is the importance of taking action on the things that bring up the fear. Breathing it in and facing it. And with facing our fears we release our fears, they leave us, and then we become fearless.
For example, I always wanted to be a professional coach, a professional speaker. When I first started professional speaking, I had so much fear around being in front of a camera. And it just took me so long to record a video being in front of stage.
At the beginning I couldn't sleep the night before. And then I started doing these things repeatedly which released the fear.
Now I can stand up in front of an audience without fear. But the only reason why is not because I didn't have the fear in the first place.
It's because I did have the fear in the first place and then I decided to consciously do the things that I was afraid of. So now I don't have the fear.
The more fearless we become in life the more empowered we become because we stop holding ourselves back from playing a small game and we start stepping into more of our own greatness inside our lives.
So I want to encourage you to face the things that give you fear, even in just the smallest little ways.
Now, a lot of people say when it comes to our fear, you've got to take massive action. You've got to completely change everything.
All the research shows that that's not the best way to approach it.
Instead it's about taking small, manageable, and consistent steps on a regular basis every day. Do one little thing to take one step towards your goals and the things that are truly inside your heart.
MATT LAVARS
One of Australia's leading coaches, trainers and speakers, and head facilitator at The Coaching Institute. In between mentoring thousands of coaches and leaders all around Australasia and helping others build incredible culture, Matt is passionate about fitness and music. His healthy office lunches whipped up in five minutes are the stuff of legend
