"The fears we don't face become our limits."- Robin Sharma, leadership expert and author
Did you know that not all of our fears are upfront and obvious to us? Sometimes fear shows up in our lives in other ways, and so we don't think about or respond to it in the same way. And it's usually holding us back from something that's better for us.
It's by discovering our fears, bringing them into the light to examine them, and taking action to alleviate them, that we are able to move forward in our lives, goals and dreams. Let's explore.
I'm at an age when people start feeling like they have more life behind them than ahead. Though I don't necessarily feel that way, I do understand the fears that come up around our own mortality, of not being able to do and see and experience everything we want to, because we only have one life here and our time in it is limited.
For many people, that's an immense fear. It's almost tangible. But it strikes me that by entertaining that fear, real or not, we may be missing other ways fear is showing up in our lives, and actually preventing us from doing the things we want to do.
Let's talk about how fear manifests itself. You may not identify some of these things as fear, but when you look deeper, you can see why and how they in fact are.
Fear might look like:
Anger - When we get angry about something, what's at the root of it? Sometimes it's becasue we are afraid of the inability to control. Whether we are angry with ourselves or someone else, it's often about our inability to control our emotions, behaviors or thoughts.
And when someone makes us angry, we fear our inability to control their opinions, decisions and actions.
Apathy - Getting to the point of feeling like we just don't care anymore can also be about fear. If we don't care about something, we can't be hurt by it. And if we don't care, we don't do anything about it. Because doing something about it might be scary. Things will change. We might have to let go of things or people, we might have to quit our job, we might have to move.
Even if the change is less drastic than those examples, it's still change. And that's something we as human beings seem to universally fear.
Controlling Others - When we don't have control, we often get angry. But what's driving the need to control in the first place? When we feel insecure in a romantic relationship, for example, we try to exert control over our partner. We place demands and limits on them, create expectations of how they are to behave, and try to bend them to our will. Yet this isn't about them. It's about us. It's about our fears of being abandoned, of feeling not good enough, of getting hurt. By controlling them, we think we can control our fears.
Another example is when we try to control our children. I'm not talking about rules or expectations we may have to keep them safe, but rather about the limits we place on them because of our fears around what other people may think of our parenting skills, or whether or not our kids are "normal" and part of the status quo.
We fear judgment, so we try to fit our kids into a socially acceptable box so others don't look down on us. (There's a lot more to trying to control our children, I'll explore that in more depth in a future post.)
Sadness - How is sadness about fear? It's not always, and it's important to acknowledge and deal with sadness, but fear can mask itself in this way. When we're sad, especially about circumstances we feel we can't control, we sometimes take on a victim mentality.
Everything bad is happening to us, nobody cares about us, there's nothing we can do. When we are at a point when we are sad about circumstances, similar to apathy, we may feel that there's nothing we can do, that we have no responsibility or ability to change things.
But it's not the sadness that drives us to take that view; it's fear. By not holding ourselves responsible, we don't have to do anything that scares us. We can feel sorry for ourselves or blame others, and expect other people to take care of us or take responsibility for our feelings.
These are a few examples of how fear can show up. Think about your own life -- have you unconsciously been held back because of fear disguised as something else? Reflect on those examples and look at getting to the root of your fears. When you bring that fear into the light, you can start to take a good look at it, start understanding and learning about it, in order to change it.
I'll be talking about how these fears prevent us from moving forward, and how we can take action to address them, in my next few blog posts. Stay tuned!
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