What would your life be like if you didn’t operate from a place of fear? Or rather allow fear to control you?

I find that fear is an often misunderstood emotion, and our relationship to fear is a somewhat complicated one. On one hand fear protects us from danger, but on the other hand, at an extreme, fear can be debilitating, paralyzing, and keep us from achieving our best selves and living our fullest lives. I also find many well-intentioned “explainers” (like myself) offer solutions in the hopes to downplay, discount, dismiss, bypass, or eliminate fear altogether, without accounting for the fact that we are hard-wired to feel fear and for good reason – it is our personal alarm system.

Fear (like any emotion) is something to be appreciated, balanced, and controlled. It’s also an instinct that is designed to protect you – to compel you to run, hide, or fight. Our fear instincts were first installed when we had to survive among lions, and tigers and bears (oh my!) But now we live in an infinitely more complex and sophisticated society, and what we fear is typically less about our physical environment (unless we live in an unsafe place). Our fears tend to be more subtle, instead of fearing lions invading our caves – we fear things that are more personal, social, parental, societal, political, or economic.

So what I would like to do is to explore fear a bit more, demystify it, categorize it even, and, in Part 2 of this post, offer some thoughtful strategies that will allow us to embrace fear, appreciate its protection, and move beyond it to make those crucial decisions, take those necessary risks, and act in a way that is consistent with our highest selves. How? By tilting the scales with courage, reason, past performance, and sometimes sheer determination and will.

I have found that to overcome fear, we must first understand and deconstruct it in its many forms. I have also found that if you can categorize something, it separates you from it and gives you a greater sense of power and control of it. In my humble observation, I have found there to be three categories of fear:

Fear of Loss or Pain – This is a fear of negative outcomes. This type of fear cautions you to avoid an action or decision, because it may lead to a loss of some kind in opportunity, time, money, reputation, love, respect, self-image. In other words, we fear pain, discomfort, disappointment, rejection, or even missing out. This type of fear causes us to procrastinate and also includes fear of risks, fear of failure, and even fear of success (in that we fear the hard work necessary or the inability to cope with the outcomes related to massive success).

Fear of Change – Over time and habituation, we develop neural pathways (connections between our brain and the rest of our nervous system) for all of our learned actions and activities. Eventually, we become comfortable in our neural routines and those actions and activities become nearly automatic. Fear of change is the type of fear that cautions us that our neural pathways are about to get re-routed in [perhaps] a significant way. This could be a job change, a process change, the need to learn a new skill, or perhaps a move from one place to another.

Fear of the Unknown – This last type of fear, put simply, is the fear of not knowing what to expect. This last type of fear is unsettling to us, because we are creatures of habit, knowing, and expectation. We naturally do better when we know the background/context (what happened in the past); when we know what’s going on now (what’s happening presently); and when we know what to expect next (what will happen in the future). It is simply “not knowing” the outcome that we fear. Will it be good? Will it be bad? To not know is worse than knowing the potential bad outcome of an action/decision. An example of this would be taking an exam for educational or professional purposes. If we have to wait for the results, that wait is painful sometimes. Or perhaps you apply for a position you really wanted only to wait for weeks or even months for a reply either way – a rejection would be better than not knowing. Again, the wait and the not-knowing can be excruciating.

Remember, the likelihood of your worst fear or worst case scenario coming true is not very high. Our imagination is so vivid that our fears can take on a life of their own, and are often much bigger and worse than reality actually is. For example, most people fear to give a presentation more than they fear death, but more often than not they do just fine. I mean seriously, the last time you gave a talk, did your pants really fall down and everyone laughed you out of the room? Probably not.

To Be Continued …

Question: If you were to categorize fear, what other categories would you come up with? You can leave a comment by clicking here.