How to overcome FEAR
Fear is a part of our every day lives and to achieve Self Leadership we must understand and work with our fears so that they do not prevent us achieving our objectives.
Or as the bard, William Shakespeare, put it, “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt”.
Fear takes many forms and can vary in intensity from a mild discomfort to a paralysing phobia. You may be surprised to realise that most people have some type of fear that is preventing them reaching their full potential in life or business.
Fear of… flying, public speaking, meeting people, commitment, success, failure, cold calling, criticism, ill health, death, closed places, confrontation, snakes, spiders…etc. etc.
Fear can a survival mechanism with the purpose of prevent us from engaging in dangerous activities, but overdone it can be extremely limiting.
With the Self Leadership we can ’step back’ from our fears and question whether our fears are real and valid or blown up out of proportion; and if our fears fall in the latter category – to overcome them.
It is worth considering that FEAR is an acronym for…
False Evidence Appearing Real.
NLP and Neuro Semantics teach us that we react not to reality itself but to our mental representation of reality. Our fear is a reaction to the movies we play in our mind about past and future events.
I was once giving a training on presentation skills when one, otherwise successful bank vice president told me she had cold sweats for three days before each presentation. I asked her what mental movies she created when she thought about a training – “Well first I see all the people staring at me without blinking and I see their faces getting bigger and closer to me and I hear a voice inside my head saying – you are going to freeze, you are going to stuff up”. That certainly sounded like a horror movie to me, no wonder she is afraid to present.
In this case the fear was out of proportion to the risk. Presentations aren’t life threatening. They can be career threatening if you don’t prepare and speak with confidence and in this case our bank VP was robbing herself of confidence.
If you change your mental movies you change your reactions. To do this you need to be able to step back from the movie and realise it isn’t real.
There is a Moorish proverb that says, “He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him.”
Have you ever hired a video or DVD and then realised that it was a really bad film? Would you hire it and play it again? Of course not! Why is it then that when we have a bad experience we play that mental movie over and over and over again?
With this current financial crisis are you playing horror movies of how bad things are? Or are you playing mental movies of how to best position yourself and your company for future success?
To de-power an unresourceful mental movie you need to step back from it and create distance so that you realise it’s only a movie. In addition if you change you movie to black and white you will find it has less power over you. You did know that you could change the quality of your internal movies – didn’t you? Editing our internal movies gives us power over our states of mind (self leadership).
If you would like to erase a movie that has been playing over and over, follow these steps.
1. Start with a black and white, still frame that just precedes the start of your ‘fear’ movie.
2. With the movie in black and white and you distanced from it (as if you are in the projection booth), run the movie to the end, and keep on running it until you reach a pleasant scene (this might be quite some time after the original movie).
3. Step into the pleaseant scene, fully experience it.
4. Now run the movie backwards to the first still frame. It helps if you can make the whirring sound of a video recorder being fast rewound.
5. Step back into the pleasant scene and rewind the movie 5 or 6 more times.
This process has the effect of scrambling your neural association to this movie and frees you to make new meanings in your mind for what is empowering for you.
This is an abbreviated description of the fast phobia cure that is taught in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic (NS) practitioner trainings. If you know a coach who is trained in NLP or NeuroSemantics you can also ask them to run this pattern with you.
“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”
Realising that there is a way to release you fears, large or small, is now the time to let them go?
’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They said, ’’We are afraid.’’
’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They came. He pushed them… and they flew.
- Guillaume Apollinaire
February 6th, 2009 at 4:39 am
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January 8th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
Hey! I admire your writing and the way you explain things. Some of the comments on here too are insightful. I appreciate you. keep it up!