by Scott Allan
When you believe in fear, you create fear, setting a course for either a life of success or bitter failure.
The Shape of Fear
Fear molds and shapes the course of life in many ways. Fears can empower you to become more than you are, or it enslaves you to diminish any chances for success at all. Fear is a powerful emotional state of mind. When you are in control of your emotions and mental state, you acquire the personal power to take control of any fear-based thoughts you are having.
The ability to work with and manage your fear so it is no longer your enemy but instead becomes your ally is possible through recognizing the things, events, and people that make you fearful.
Remember this: you can’t hide from your fear; you must take immediate action and do the things you are afraid to do. Only then will you experience the true meaning of freedom.
Remember that the fear you experience in any situation will never go away. You will never be rid of fear because when faced with a new problem or challenge, you will most likely experience fear as part of the natural course.
Learn to accept this truth, and then you can take the steps necessary to live with it and adopt it as an ally rather than an enemy.
Below are some of the areas that we can focus on to shape our fears, using them as powerful tools that work for us rather than against.
Fear shapes thoughts.
Unconditioned fear produces fearful thoughts that lead to negative thinking and another pathway to self-defeat. Thoughts that are fear-based infect every aspect of your life—your self-esteem, self-confidence, willpower to take action, opportunity, and ability to visualize goals clearly.
When we are trapped in the negative thought patterns of uncontrolled fear, we create a mental paralysis that fuels self-defeat.
Fear shapes mental attitude.
It is not the events that shape our lives, but rather our attitude toward those events. If your fears are allowed to take over and turn every situation into a frightening experience, your mental attitude will weaken, bringing unwanted results and disempowering your life in many ways.
Work to build up your mental attitude into a powerful, positive state and maintain control over the thoughts that influence the mental condition. People with a healthy and well-conditioned mental attitude are rarely affected or frightened by fear. They know they can handle anything thrown their way.
Fear shapes success.
There is the myth that in order to be successful at anything, you have to first get rid of the fear blocking your path. This is true to some extent, but it is your association with your deepest fears and not facing up to your traumas that have kept you frozen in place.
Depending on your relationship with fear, you can create the best or the worst of worlds. Success is about overcoming your fears and learning to live with the fear you do have. When you confront a fear and rid yourself of the power it has over you, your real success begins to take shape. Every time you act in the face of your fear, when you take control over the devices that keep you trapped, that is the victory.
Remember that fear is not always a bad thing. The more you work to control it, the more you can use it to your advantage. For example, perhaps your biggest self-defeating fear is the fear of not having any money.
You can feed into this fear by believing in it, thus keeping an abundance of money away from you. Or you can take charge and figure out a way to increase your income, either through business investments, a strong financial portfolio, or taking a personal financial course.
The key to having success over fear is action. Sometimes the fear of not having or of losing something is a powerful motivator encouraging you to go after it. Fear is a road sign that points you in the direction of success. If you follow it, you will encounter that fear, and when you do, you will realize it was there to prompt you to take action.
Fear shapes beliefs.
The experiences we have create many of our beliefs. If those experiences were perceived as frightful or harmful, we develop a phobia surrounding the fear to try to avoid repeating that experience at all costs. Everyone has something they fear, and this fear begins with your belief in something that is harmful, dangerous, or a threat.
Remember that what you believe in becomes your reality. If you believe in the fears that govern your life and control your actions, this is the reality you create for yourself. The things you positively believe in are attracted to you.
The things you fear the most are attracted to you. Change your fear-based beliefs and you can shift the possible negative outcome of any situation into a positive experience.
Solutions for Handling the Fear
Solution #1: Imagine the best outcome possible. You have to believe in the life you want to own. If it is our habit to imagine the worst possible situations coming true, we become so distracted that we can’t see all that our life has to offer. When all you imagine and think about are catastrophic endings, you create the exact results and situations you fear coming true.
This stems from one of the great laws of attraction: what we perceive to be real ultimately is real. When you believe in your fears, you create your fears. From this moment on, focus on the best possible outcome for any situation, no matter how hopeless a situation appears to be at that moment. Imagine the situation you want to create, and not the scenario that your fear-based mind is feeding to you.
Solution #2: Challenge the beliefs holding you prisoner. The most fearful events of all are imagined ones. We imagine over and over again the terrifying events that are going to take place. We obsess about them, think about them, and try to invent ways that will stop the worst from coming true by avoiding all risks whatsoever. In the process, many of us end up avoiding living our lives once the fear becomes so bad.
Inevitably, you are creating the situations allowing these disasters to occur. Remember, most fear is an illusion of disbelief that we are convinced is the truth. This is how fear starts to build itself up. It starts as something small at one point, and through the habitual practice of consistent fear building, events that never take place blossom into uncontrollable fantasies of terror.
Take charge and challenge your irrational beliefs and thoughts. Think about what would happen if the worst event imaginable really did occur. Often it is not the fear of what will happen that scares us the most; rather, it is the doubt of our own ability to handle the situation when and if it does happen. We are afraid of ourselves, afraid that we won’t be able to find a solution to deal with a fearful situation when it happens.
Perhaps you fear losing your job, in which case you might be more terrified of the prospect of having to find another job. It is our fear of having to face the fear that immobilizes us. What if I fail? What if can’t handle it? What if I can handle it, and then I am given further responsibility?
Well, you can handle it. Act as if it has already happened. Instead of being afraid of it happening, accept that it will happen, and that now you have to confront it head on. Train your mind to handle anything that comes your way. Fear keeps you immobilized; action mobilizes you.
Solution #3: Educate yourself about fear. One of the greatest discoveries I ever made about fear is that the more you know about what causes your fear, the less afraid you are and the more manageable your fears become.
Fear is often created through the absence of knowledge. Get to know your fears by learning about them, studying them, and trying to trace them back to their origins. Every fear has a point of origin. Trace your fears back to their point of origin and you will unravel a great mystery.
Find resources on your fears and read about the people that have overcome the same fears you are now experiencing. Copy the techniques and tools they used to manage their fears and apply them to your own life. If one technique doesn’t work right away, try another, and keep trying different methods of fear removal until you find the one that works for you.
Solution #4: Replace the negative with the positive. This is a process I like to call swapping. You
r fears have been conditioned to respond to certain situations that you find threatening. However, if you follow the advice in the previous technique, you will be able to take those negative reactions and turn them into positive ones.
Negativity is a conditioned response. You were not born this way. You learned to be negative, probably through your own failures to measure up to the expectations of others and yourself, or through watching others closest to you, like your parents, deal poorly with their own problems.
One of the ways to win over the negativity fear produces is to turn a negative thought or belief into a positive one as soon as it occurs. If you suddenly have the thought this isn’t going to work out, turn that thought around immediately. Tell yourself, it is all working out right now, just as it should. I have control over this. Continue this method of thought control until turning over your fearful, negative thoughts becomes second nature.
Two Sides of the Fear-Based Mind
Remember that for every fear you have, you are also afraid of the opposite. If you fear failure, chances are you fear the complete opposite of failure, which would be success. If you fear rejection, you also fear being accepted. Likewise, fear of change invokes a fear of staying the same, or staying in a rut, or of not making progress in your life.
It is a catch-22 scenario. You feel damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You feel completely immobile, unable to move, or take any action whatsoever; every step is an intense effort. Let’s take a look at some of these fears below that have had a chokehold on your life.
Identifying our fears is the first step to working out a system for managing them. Below is a list of the fears we create through our experiences and imagination. Check the fears that have had an impact on your life. Imagine yourself living without this fear. What would you do? How would you behave? What actions would you take if the fear was not controlling you?
Make a list of the disadvantages and roadblocks that each fear poses. See how many of your own fears you can add to this list.
Fear of failure and/or success
Fear of responsibility
Fear of love and intimacy
Fear of rejection and/or being accepted
Fear of being poor and/or rich (money-based fears)
Fear of making mistakes (see Perfection)
Fear of being judged
Fear of people
Fear of changing and/or staying the same
Fear of ailments and sickness
Now, take some time to answer these questions about fear.
What negative impact have these fears had on your life?
What positive impact have these fears had on your life?
What are the advantages/disadvantages to holding on to these fears? On a sheet of paper, draw a line down the center and label the left half Advantages of Fear and, on the right side, Disadvantages of Fear.
If there were one fear that you could eliminate right now, what would it be? How has this fear controlled your life? What will happen if it continues to dominate your choices? Mind map your solutions and decide to implement the best choice.
Procrastination: The Second Obstacle of Defeat
A disagreeable challenge, task, problem or work that is put off for an undetermined length of time in order to avoid the pain or discomfort of having to work through it.
Procrastination, or task avoidance, is a defensive technique used to escape from the pain and unpleasantness of having to perform an undesirable task. This is a habit of escape used to get out of doing something that has been linked to your mind as an activity that is dull, boring, or—in some cases—plain terrifying.
The Cost of Procrastination
It is a vicious game we play with ourselves while we dance around our feelings of fear, criticism, self-loathing, low self-esteem, and guilt associated with our behaviors. The self-defeating behavior of task avoidance is a defense mechanism to escape reality, and as long as we have something to remove attention from our responsibilities, we won’t have to face the pain of dealing with the burden of an unwanted situation.
Procrastination costs your valuable time, money, and self-esteem, and if continued over a lifetime, the end cost is the life you could have had but never did. Task avoidance catches up with you, and the things you try to avoid will only pile up, higher and higher, until you can’t see over the mountain of stuff bogging down your life.
Even the smallest of jobs must be done, and if they are not done by you, they have to be done by someone else. This puts your responsibility on other people: friends, family, coworkers, and even people you don’t know have to clean up after you. Procrastination is a game that affects everyone, not just you, and this is something we must come to realize if we are to overcome this pattern of putting off life.
What Leads to Task Avoidance?
A person who is in the habit of procrastinating will either avoid starting something or will fail to finish something, often quitting halfway through. Procrastination emerges out of associating pain with the activity you know must be done.
One of the fears associated with procrastinating is trying something different. The thought of taking that first leap into the unknown causes most people to just stand on the edge and gaze into the great abyss rather than taking a leap of faith. For the person who is accustomed to putting off those things they want to avoid, they freeze at the thought of failing under harsh criticism.
This problem can be overcome by taking small steps. Instead of being overwhelmed by a project or task, break it up into small pieces and tackle each piece of the project in stages.
Consider each part of the task as a piece to a much larger whole. People have achieved their dreams through this easy process of breaking down difficult, lengthy tasks or work-related projects. You can, too.
“Procrastination is like a credit card:
it's a lot of fun until you get the bill.”
— Christopher Parker
A Short Exercise
Now, before reading any further, take a moment and write down a job or project that you have been avoiding. Write it out in big letters at the top of the page.
Next, brainstorm a list of small actions you are going to take to start working on this project. Is it a phone call? Filling out a form? Doing a bit of research online?
Write down as many of the steps you can think of that will start things moving in a positive direction. Now, choose one of the actions on the list. This is the first step you are going to do right now. After it has been completed, cross it of the list and choose another small task.
Remember this: The more action you take, the more momentum you create!
The “Someday” Strategy
People who avoid those things that should be done have one common trait inherent in almost every thought they have: they believe in a magical tomorrow, where everything they plan to do and have been avoiding for the last several months or years is somehow going to get done on this special day.
Of course, tomorrow eventually shows up, a lot sooner than was expected, and because you are not yet ready to start, everything gets pushed back to the next day.
This is the inherent cycle of procrastination, and the basic foundation for this behavior that robs people of their very lives. It is a belief that someday we will get our lives together. Someday I will think about my future. Someday I will take a chance and write that book, take that course, or go on that trip. Someday turns out to be forever!
It is a natural path we take to avoid unpleasant things. Life is full of things we would rather not do, activities that we view as a waste of time but must be done in order to make progress and continue to grow. Take care of things as they come up, and if you can’t do it right away for lack of information or resources, make sure it gets done when the time is right.
To help you with this, I have included two techniques for getting you started on the road to action recovery. I would also recommend you read The Procrastinator’s Handbook by Rita Emmett or The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore
for further insight into defeating and managing procrastination.
Managing Procrastination
Make a task/activity avoidance list. Create a list of jobs, tasks, or projects you have been meaning to “get around to” but just haven’t found the time.
Write down everything you possibly can, no matter how big or small, and create a list of activities, chores, jobs, and tasks that have piled up in your to-do pile. Then, once you have your list compiled, select the activities or jobs you are going to tackle first.
Choose a task, stick with it, get it done, and move on to the next one. The key is to create the feeling that you are making progress, even if it is a small step. One step ahead is better than both feet stuck indefinitely in the same spot.
Break it down. If it is a project that will take time, break it down into manageable chunks. Focus on one task at a time. Remember, if feeling overwhelmed is one of your avoidance triggers, you don’t want to start several things at once.
You may have avoided some activities because the overall size of the project causes you to feel swamped or crushed under the weight of doing too many things. The job appears too large to your mind, so it seeks ways to avoid doing it. You see the project as one big whole. It’s like you are standing at the bottom of the world’s tallest mountain, looking up and wondering how am I going to ever climb this?
Now, imagine yourself standing at the bottom of that mountain looking up, and suddenly, every couple hundred feet or so you see rest stations where you can catch your breath, have a coffee, and build up your energy before the long trek to the next ledge.
Suddenly, what first seemed like an impossible journey is looking more and more manageable as you make progress, advancing by stages. Each ledge you come to brings you closer to your goal, until you eventually reach your destination.
Every challenge, project, or journey at first appears as a small speck on the horizon, but what brings it closer is taking that first step. And then another step, and then another. You will get there through steady progress, but you won’t get anywhere if you remain frozen in place, terrified to move.