Do Not Let Fear Hold You Back

“Never let your fears hold you back from pursuing your hopes.”

  – John F. Kennedy

How does one become fearless?  Can you really be totally fearless?  Would you want to?  I think that if fear is standing in the way of something that I want to do, then I need to do something to break up that fear into smaller pieces.  My own experience in life so far has been that some measure of fear is healthy.  It helps me to not be stupid and hurt myself.  It also feeds into my spirit of victory when I accomplish something by growing through the fear of doing it anyway.

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

  – Dale Carnegie

So how do you control fear in your life?  How do you control your life at all? How do you figure out what is within your control and what isn’t?  Part of it starts with understanding what is and is not under your control.  When you accept responsibility for and control over, such things as your judgments, impulses, and desires, then your life changes completely.  These are things that are within your ability to control.  If you try to control other things beyond your control, that is when you just get weighed down. It is like trying to swim with cement shoes, it isn’t going to end well.

Here’s the truth about big life changes:  some people won’t come with you.  and that’s okay.

  – Early Mama

We can’t control our reputation because it is based on exterior things that are beyond our control.  We can’t control the spin that other people put upon what we say or do.  We can, however, chose to take the high road and not get mired down in the drama.  How many times have things you have said or done been taken out of context and used against you?  You will be driven crazy trying to control stuff like that.

Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

  – Buddha

Your anxiety or getting angry about it doesn’t make it go away.  It doesn’t suddenly become something that you can control.  All it does is make you unhappy and destroy your peace of mind.  You have the choice of continuing to self-inflict injuries upon yourself by trying to control it, or you can let it go.  Realize that in the end, people will either recognize you for who you really are or they won’t.  It is not something within your control.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

  – Thegoodvibe.com

The realization that what other people do is not your job to control, and you can’t make them change, will shift your world completely.  You begin to focus on walking your own path.  You are no longer try to control another person’s journey.  With your focus on your journey, the ups and downs of life even out.  Your path becomes more serene.  You aren’t trying to avoid drama, you are just not drawing it into your world.  If something comes into your space, you just take a few deep breaths, let go of any desire to change someone’s else’s journey and keep walking drama free.

The fears we don’t face becomes our limits.

  – Robin Sharma

What is amazing is that we also have the ability to shift the memories we have into ones that don’t create a negative emotional response inside of us.  Our brain allows us to recall memories and reconsolidate them.  This means that we can take a childhood memory and add new information that wasn’t available to us as children.  We can turn fearful memories into fearless ones.

Everything we want is on the other side of fear.

  – Jack Canfield

My sister Julie, for example, is a real scaredy cat.  She jumps at anything.  When she was a teenager, there was a movie that came out with a ventriloquist dummy that was a horror show.  She was watching T.V. alone late at night and the commercial came on for the movie.  She was terrified that it was coming after her.  So she went to my parent’s bedroom door, opened it and called for my mom.  My parent’s bedroom was up some stairs, and their bed was against the railing of the stairs.  So my mom leaned over the railing to tell my sister to be quiet so she didn’t wake up our dad.  When my sister saw a head looming down the staircase she screamed and fell over backward, falling down the couple of stairs that she had started up.  Needless to say, my dad was woken up – lol.

When you open your mind, you open new doors to new possibilities for yourself and new opportunities to help others.

  – Roy Bennett

My sister as an adult can laugh at this story and it is no longer scary, because she has new information available to her, that her teenage self didn’t have.  We can do this with any scary memory that we have.  Update our memory with new information.

Life is like a game.  You can play it safe and be good, or you can take a chance and be great.

  – iliketoquote.com

With visualization, we can do the same thing to our future.  We can see into our future regarding something that we are scared of.  We can go through the experience step by step over and over again in our mind.  We can cross over from being fearful of the situation to being confident of it.  This is exactly what Olympic Athlete’s do.  They see themselves performing their routines perfectly over and over again.  They have hooked up machines to them and discovered that the muscles of the athletes are actually firing just like they were physically doing the routine when they are just using visualization.  The more they do this, the better their skills become.

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

  – Neale Donald Walsch

So with visualization, we can preview anything coming up in our lives that we have intense fears over.  We can practice what we would say or do over and over again.  This will give us some confidence that we can accomplish the thing that we are afraid to do.  When a rock climber wants to solo a difficult climb without ropes, they start out with ropes.  They climb it several times to learn where to put their hands and feet.  They then replay the climb over and over again in their minds.  They lose a lot of the fear over the climb this way because they have gained confidence in their ability to do it by the repetition.

I am the master of my habits.

  – #Goalgetter

So break down the walls of fear that you built to keep you safe.  Start believing and visualizing your dreams coming true.  Take a practice run to see what you can do with the ropes of safety.  Then expand that with visualization.  Then go for the life you have been dreaming of living.  Don’t let fear hold you back.  Go become the person that you have never been, but wished you were.