Fear is the inner voice that sparks inside you to protect you from danger. It is the voice that screams, you are not prepared! This fear will eat at any confidence you may have had until you turn around and get yourself back to safety. This fear is so impairing that it can even put you in danger at worst or cause you to fail at best. All this is not to say fear is a bad thing. It is a signal that must be understood. If you are going to perform and operate in such a manner, fear is detrimental. However, it is possible to overcome it. Let’s explore how to overcome your fears.
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Understanding Fear
As mentioned, fear is a natural response to stimuli your body detects as dangerous and a threat to your safety. Safety is a very relative and personal thing, however. Many things in this world could be deemed dangerous. For example, even walking is dangerous for some if you cannot trust your legs to keep you stable. Yet, Olympians are out there walking and running at such a rate that a trip and fall would devastate the human body. Yet, they do not fear walking or running. Why?
The answer lies in the fact that it runs all the time. They constantly test the limits of their ability to walk and run to the point they feel they have a guaranteed capability of walking and running in their current state. The innate fear a person feels internally subsides when they have confidence in their actions.
Building skills and exposure to overcome your fears
The secret lies in your want to overcome the fear from passion to commitment or any other reason. It must be strong enough to compel you to do what it takes to work through the fear. Overcoming fear is not easy. With a steeled resolve, however, comes the strategy. A strategy that will build skills and experience around the root of your fear will inevitably help build confidence. You will find skills used directly to keep you safe from your fears and chip away at the fear slowly until you no longer feel it in common situations. Check out my guide on how to learn skills quickly for advice on how to start building such skills.
It is essential to ramp up slowly, however. Let us say you have a fear of heights. A few examples that come to mind to help overcome such fears might start with hiking. It would be best if you didn’t jump to hiking up steep faces. Instead, you should start with easy hikes and build confidence upward. As you gain experience and a higher degree of comfort hiking, you slowly work into steeper and steeper hikes. You are progressively tackling hikes that have steeper drops. Naturally, you will find that you will feel less fear if you continue to be persistent. You will feel that you have done this many times and thus have confidence in overcoming steep slopes. This, in turn, will diminish your fear of heights greatly.
Practice and build experience that gives you the confidence to conquer the fear
I will say this doesn’t always work for everyone. However, it helps significantly if you go into these skill-building activities to gain new skills and overcome your fears. It takes a bit of conscious thought to be able to push yourself and see the confidence in your capabilities as you improve. Otherwise, it can be very easy to miss the newfound confidence or push yourself too far, where you still feel fear because you crossed outside of your comfort zone of confidence.
You must practice. Often and repetitiously, it is this practice that builds comfort over time. More importantly, it helps you build experience. Using your skills and overcoming challenges firsthand. These experiences will stick with you and give you that direct indicator: “Hey, I can do this.” “I have done this many times!” It is precisely this confidence that anyone trying to do anything dangerous must build before they can survive the danger. There are no shortcuts that make an effort, time, and eventual accomplishment of overcoming your fears so rewarding.
What fear do you want to overcome?
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