Sometimes I make good choices, and sometimes bad, yet I can easily assign “good” and “bad” labels based on what I think is desirable or undesirable. Sometimes I don’t really know if I made a good choice until I see the consequences of that choice. Then I attach my labels. As long as I made the choice and did my best to do things right, I can’t find fault in myself for trying—or at least I shouldn’t. After all, at the very least I’ve created a learning opportunity. Failure is an opportunity to learn.
If I make a choice and follow it through to its logical conclusion, I will discover my consequences, which I will certainly label as either good or bad, success or failure. Today in my world, both labels are good, but it wasn’t always that way. With success, I am happy because things went according to plan; people are happy. With failure, I may be humiliated, even ridiculed, but I’ll have another opportunity to learn, and learning is what makes life worth living. This is why I need to make my decisions very consciously and conscientiously, paying strict attention to how and why I’ve come to the decision. After all, my decisions, and the actions I take on them, will determine my consequences.
I don’t see myself (or anyone else) getting off the merry-go-round of choices and consequences anytime soon, so I’ve come to believe it’s important to participate in my choices—to choose to choose. Then I do my best to learn from the consequences that follow, be they positive or negative, good or bad, success or failure. I do my best not to let fear of those potential consequences stop me from doing what I need to do.
Realizing That Fear Really Only Takes Two Forms
The best way I know to overcome fear is by experience. When I face something frightening, I must face it head-on and walk through the fear, doing the next right thing the best I can. When I do this, fear shrinks. When I shrink away from fear, it grows in every corner of my life. Only fear or courage can dominate. Only one can take the lead, so my choice is simple: I can feed my fear or I can feed my courage. It’s like the old story about the two dogs, one scary and the other rather likable. A version goes like this:
A man said, “Inside me there are two dogs. One dog is evil and the other is good. They fight all the time.” When asked which dog wins, he reflects for a moment and replies, “The one I feed the most.”
I see fear and courage in the same way. The one that wins is the one I feed the most. If I feed the fear, fear wins, and I end up angry or depressed because anger is fear projected and depression is fear internalized.
I came to this conclusion after taking yet another look at how fear works in my life. This time I came to see only two sources of fear. Either I am afraid I will lose something I want to keep, or I’m scared I won’t get something I want. When I looked at fear in this way, I was able to see just how small fear really is—and how selfish I can be when I act in fear. It’s pretty selfish to fear not getting something, no matter how badly I may want it, and it’s rather petty to fear losing something I already have. Sure, there are some justifiable fears. For example, I worry about someone breaking into my house and stealing my stuff. I also have great concerns about keeping my job so I can maintain my current lifestyle. But if I look at these things rationally, I come to see that burglars have rarely stolen from me, and the things they have stolen have been replaced. I also see that while I have lost jobs in the past, I’ve always managed to find another one. I’m not usually dealing with material things when it comes to getting what I want or losing something I have. Most of the time I fear losing face or not being recognized, and these are irrational fears. They are fears of what other people might think of me.
Because fear likes to look all dressed up and complicated, it can be difficult to see a particular instance of fear as fitting into either the “what am I afraid of losing,” or “what am I afraid I won’t get,” categories, but if I look hard enough, I can usually do it. Often it takes time to figure out what I will lose or not gain in a given situation. This is particularly true when the thing to be lost or not gained is emotional or spiritual rather than material. It is simply hard to measure or calculate. At these times I need to rely on faith—I need to trust the process, knowing fear will be a part of it—and just do the next right thing. It may not be until I look back that I can see what I stood to gain or lose. Only then can I know what I have discovered about myself. What have I given up because of the action? If I lose something, the thing I feared losing is just what I needed to get rid of in order to move on with my life.
As I began to see fear as losing something I want to keep or not getting something I want, I began to see fear like a ghost. I’m a fan of ghost stories, and in ghost stories the ghost itself can’t harm anyone without his or her help. A ghost can’t cause physical harm; it can only scare someone into doing something where the action taken causes the harm. In ghost stories, the ghost usually scares the person into doing something like jumping out of a window. The ghost didn’t do anything to cause the person physical harm. It only raised enough fear to cause the person to harm himself.
When I address fear in this manner, I can see it for what it is. It’s just a big boogeyman that likes to make me do things I wouldn’t do if the fear wasn’t there to influence me. In order to overcome my fear, I must look the ghost in the eye and say, “You aren’t going to influence my decisions. I know what I need to do, and I intend to do it. You might as well go bother someone else.”
The more I do this, the more I feed my courage, and the more I feed my courage, the more it grows. By my walking through my fear, less energy is available for the fear in my life. My fear will eventually starve. When fear discovers there is nothing for it to gain at my house, it will move on and search out other sources of energy.
Fear has limitations. When I calmly and rationally identify these limitations, I not only see fear for what it really is, I can learn to overcome it. This isn’t to say that fear will leave me completely, or forever. I’m not so naive as to believe that, but I have learned that I can reduce fear to a point where nearly all the fear I have is constructive. This is where fear becomes a tool I can use.
Fear Is Just Part of the Process
Constructive fear is the fear that sets butterflies free in my stomach before I give a speech or puts me on the edge of my seat before a job interview. These kinds of fear help me perform by pushing me to do my best. They are still fears that fall into the above-mentioned categories, fear of failure and fear of not getting something I want. Yet I can use them to my advantage. It takes patience and practice to make it work for me, but I have found it to be a wonderful use of fear. I know it’s part of the process of giving a speech or interviewing for a job, so I can put it to good use.
When I say fear is just part of the process, I don’t mean to minimize it by using the word just. My intention is to put fear in its place. When used properly, fear is a tool. And everything is a process. Life is a process—we are born, we live, we die. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it contains a grain of truth. We have no control over being born, and we have little or no control over when and how we die, unless it’s by suicide. We do have some control over how we live, and life itself is nothing more than a series of processes, choices, and consequences.
I owe this lesson to one of my first writing professors. She told me that I needed to learn to enjoy the process of writing. I have. While learning to write, which is a much larger process than I ever could have imagined, I learned that every action, every step, can be broken down into smaller processes. There are steps taken to accomplish any task. If I follow the steps laid out on the cake mix box, I’ll end up with a cake. If I want to become an electrician, there is a process I must go through. Everything in life is like this. It’s only a matter of finding, then following, the correct process in order to reach a specific goal. Fear is part of nearly every process, yet when I learn to see fear for what it is, I can overcome it and reach my goal. Most processes can be broken down into even smaller processes, which is a great way to manage things that only seem overwhelming when looked at in a larger context. Since fear usually makes things look overwhelming, I break down each process into smaller processes. When I do, I break down fear too.