Fear is one of the strongest emotions you can ever experience…fear of rejection or embarrassment being the two most common. It can overwhelm your mind and body and cause great damage to your wellbeing.
It can prevent you from taking critical action necessary to achieve. However, fear is normal and accepting this fact will help you learn how to deal with it.
The trick is to not allow fear to prevent you from proceeding with plans. Avoidance will only strengthen the fear in time, while confronting reduces it.
The following are some tips to help overcome fear:
1. Rewiring Your Brain
You need to cultivate the courage necessary to overcome fear. To do this, you need to rewire your brain to work and look at fear differently.
Luckily, your brain is adaptable to changes if you are persistent. For example, you may develop mantras and affirmations for self-esteem and confidence to help when facing new unfamiliar grounds.
Since your brain acts and reacts on past information and experiences that it has been fed, a new diet of inspirational books and audios will help to interrupt any negative inner dialogue that prevents you from exploring your potential.
This will help you change your mindset and eliminate the negative things embedded deep within you.
Initially, you may not be familiar with every aspect of your fear and why it’s hindering you from achieving goals, but taking measures to rewire your brain will help you find and work on these mysterious elements.
If you maintain the efforts to change your mindset, you will develop new and better ways to tackle your fears. Remember to always focus on the best possible outcomes.
2. Develop A Plan
Fear arises from worry, which in turn is based on over-thinking about your situation. When you over analyze your predicament, you are likely to end up causing more worry and yielding more fear.
This is normal when facing something new and unknown, or something familiar that previously resulted in a bad experience.
A way of overcoming this fear is to formalize a plan, detailing how you intend on approaching and accomplishing the feared task, ensuring the plan has mini milestones that are achievable…small wins.
Achieving these mini wins will empower you and provide the necessary momentum to complete the task, but you must take action and remain committed to the plan.
Beware that the plan, no matter how precise and detailed, may require some adjustments. Do not be frustrated at the idea of adjusting your plans. This is perfectly normal and expected as you discover new things about yourself that will keep you growing.
A good plan will give you a sense of control and joy in accomplishing the mini milestones. This joy in accomplishing the mini milestones will be your driving force to accomplish the entire task.
3. Face Your Fears
Easier said than done I know, but it actually works in so many cases. Facing your fears is the practical part of preparing for the big victory over fear.
Living in your comfort zone may offer perceived temporal safety, but it is not helpful long-term. If you are not exposed to things that frighten you, they will continue to scare and immobilize you. In psychology, habituation refers to the diminishing response to a frequently repeated stimulus.
In other words, the more an activity is repeated, the less exciting it becomes…therefore, if your nervous system is not aroused, then fear and anxiety diminishes. So the more often you face your fears, the less fearful it will become.
A good practical approach, similar to the plan described earlier, would be to face the smallest things you can find to help you gradually step out of your comfort zone.
Perhaps list the things you fear and rate them on a scale of one to ten. I don’t mean a list of all your fears, but the necessary ones that you need to overcome in order to progress. Starting with the least scary, create a plan to tackle the smallest elements of it.
For example, many people fear talking or presenting in public because they feel that any mistakes made reflects poorly on the image they want the public to see.
Tackling the smallest elements could mean accompanying a friend or colleague on their presentation several times. By watching and learning how they deal with their audiences, you will develop an understanding and acceptance that elements of fear are normal, and that it can help you to grow by challenging you.
Perhaps as you become more familiar with the presentation, with permission you could participate by helping with the set up and distribution of information, and eventually answering some of the questions.
Eventually through repetitive exposure, your courage will be nurtured and your fear of presentations and public speaking will diminish.
Sometimes, the core of any fear is buried so deep within you, that it may take some time and different efforts to address it.
But determination, persistence and commitment are the keys for change, available to anyone wishing to overcome fear and maximize their potential.
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