Fear!!

You gain strength, courage and confidence from every experience in which you really stop and look FEAR in the face. Across a whole life we meet so many fears, and somehow we learn to get past them.

I read somewhere: “Fear limits you and your vision. It serves as blinders to what may be just a few steps down the road for you.”

The journey of your life is valuable, but believing in your talents, your abilities and your self-worth can take you down a much brighter path. So why not transform fear into freedom?

What fear actually does to time

The scariest thing fear does is this: it keeps us fixed on the past, or worried about the future.

That is worth stating plainly, because it is the mechanism. Fear does not really operate in the present. Look at almost any fear you have and you will find it is either a memory being replayed as a prediction, or a future being rehearsed that has not happened and mostly never will.

Very little of it concerns right now. Right now, in most cases, you are fine. You are sitting somewhere reading something. The threat is entirely in the other two tenses.

That is not a reason to dismiss it - some fear is genuinely protective and you should listen to it. But it does explain why the antidote is so often as simple as coming back to the actual present moment and asking what is true here.

Don’t let fear or insecurity stop you from trying new things.

Don’t just believe in yourself - have faith. Do what you love. And most importantly, be kind to others, even the ones you don’t like. Don’t let fear overpower you and what you are capable of.

Start small, and start today

We all carry some kind of fear. Some are afraid of the dark, some of heights, some of water, and the list goes on. But we all know how life works. We all have to come face to face with our fear one day. So why not start today?

Slowly, try to fight it. Take small steps and challenge it. Bring it on.

I want to be practical about “small,” because people hear face your fear and imagine something dramatic, then never begin.

Small means genuinely small. If speaking up in a room terrifies you, the step is not a presentation. It is one sentence in a meeting of four people. If calling someone is the problem, the step is one two-minute call about something trivial.

Fear shrinks in response to evidence, and evidence is built out of tiny completed things, not one heroic attempt. Every small step you finish is data that contradicts the story, and enough contradicting data eventually changes the story.

The one thing we have to fear is fear itself. Remember that.

When you feel like you are losing it

Don’t be scared of everything. If you find yourself somewhere you feel you are losing your footing, remember your dreams and your ambitions. We have to stay strong past our fears to reach the good time, and the future that is full of joy.

Make yourself brave enough that you can say to yourself: “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

That sentence is not a boast. It is a receipt. You already have several of them, from things you were certain would break you and did not. Most people never count them, which is why they keep believing they are more fragile than the evidence shows.

That will be the moment a new beginning starts in your life.

-kashish