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.