FEAR - Face, Embrace, Achieve, Relieve

Fear. This four letter word can create the greatest obstacles in our life. It's the roadblock which stops us in our tracks.

Fear affects people in many ways. For some, it drives them to achieve things that make them a better person. For others, it holds them back and becomes a mountain which they simply avoid climbing.

It’s important to remember fear is a natural emotion. It’s okay to feel fear. It pushes and challenges you to be more than you already are. What’s not okay, is to let fear hold you back from the experiences and feelings it brings you. 

When you fear something, you need to ask yourself why? What is it about the situation you are fearing? As humans, we are the most amazing creatures. We have such strength and resilience in our character, we aren’t even aware of. We really don’t know what we are capable of until we push ourselves past the barrier we have created, due to fear. To make it crystal clear, you need to face your fear!

Everything in life which we fear has an outcome. We can succeed or we can fail. (There’s alot more to categorising outcomes as success or failure, however for a simplistic approach, we’ll keep it to these two.) Neither success or failure is better. Sometimes it’s the failures which teach us the most about ourselves. On the other hand, we love the successes as they give us confidence to move forward. They fill us with self-belief and encourage us to continue moving forward. Either way, embracing fear allows us to learn something.

Every time we learn something, we achieve. Learning is a life-long journey for everyone. Learning and achieving go hand in hand. As humans, we like to achieve and we like the feelings achievement brings. We are always a better person for having had the experience.

This brings us to the feeling experienced after you have conquered the fear. Relieved! You breathe a sigh of relief and your heart rate returns to normal. The butterflies in the stomach subside and the body calms down. You feel a sense a pride in having pushed yourself through the situation. You feel like you can take on anything. It’s true satisfaction.

I’ll never understand why some of us can push ourselves to face our fears and why some of us simply turn in the other direction. It seems all too hard for them. I’ll admit, it sometimes takes me a while to get the courage to face my fear, however I do get there in the end. I think focusing on the end, is key for me. Thinking of the end and how I’ll feel makes me want to push myself and be a better person than I am today.