Three simple ways to start eliminating your fears for good
Fear. It’s a bit like permafrost. Once it sets in, it permeates everything and stops you from achieving your goals and dreams – unless you start to thaw it out completely.
If you ever struggle with fear getting in the way of your life or career goals, learning how to identify, reduce and remove your fears is key to getting you moving again. But how can you achieve that?
In this article, we’ll look at three simple steps that can help to get you on your way to eliminating fear for good.
1. Identify
Fear manifests itself in non-action. If you periodically fail to reach the goals you have set for yourself, then the action required to get you from A to B isn’t being achieved.
If you fail to identify or just gloss over that, then the habit of inaction and missing your goals is likely to continue. But if you stop and take notice of what isn’t being completed, it gives you the choice to then investigate and help identify the root cause.
Common reasons (and excuses) for not reaching goals are lack of time, things being too difficult, lack of resources, lack of energy or too many other priorities. However, if you want to avoid being stuck in the permafrost of fear, the reasons and excuses for missing your goals need to be both examined and reduced.
2. Reduce
Once you have identified the actions you have failed to achieve and the reasons or excuses for them, it’s really important not to give yourself a hard time about that. The freeze has happened and you need to focus on thawing it out rather than causing yourself an injury by trying to kick the ice!
To start thawing out your fears, it can be useful to focus on two things:
- What are you lacking that you think is creating the inaction?
- What do you feel is too difficult to do and why?
Lack of time, resources, or energy can make things feel difficult
Your ability to get moving again if your car breaks down on the motorway is likely to depend on whether you have breakdown cover. If you don’t, you might have to phone for emergency cover instead. If your phone has run out of battery, you might need to flag down another motorist to help. In the heat of the moment, the uncertainty can feel difficult, but eventually, you will find the resource necessary to continue your journey.
If you lack the time to get moving towards any of your goals, then focus on setting aside a tiny little bit of time for yourself – this may sound impossible, but in reality, even if it is only two minutes of your time reading a page of a book, writing a sentence of a piece of work, thinking of a new strategy or walking around the block, this will actually get you moving again. And once you start to do this regularly, you will start to build that all important, momentum.
If you lack the knowledge or resources to start moving towards your goal, ask yourself, what am I missing? Where can I get some quick information for free that can get me moving (e.g. this website, the internet, a library, a professional association, a charity, friends and connections)? Just as with the broken down car scenario above, you will always have different options that can get you moving.
If you lack the energy to get moving, then don’t try to do too much at once. We crawl before we can stand, before we can walk, before we can run. Everything that we do tends to have a natural order to it, because that provides a safe foundation from where we can progress. A little and often is often better than trying to cram everything into the hour before you want to go to bed. If you are really struggling to muster the energy to do anything, consider whether you need to take some time out to regroup. Burnout, is sadly something that can affect our ability to muster up the enthusiasm to do anything, but taking appropriate professional advice can help to provide the safe space in which you can recover at your own pace, so that you can reprioritise your health and regain the zest for your goals and ambitions.
But remember – excuses give your fear the excuse to hang around. Don’t let an uninvited guest have an all-night pass to your party. Take appropriate action to evict it!
3. Remove
Once you get yourself moving again, it’s crucial to avoid the fear from coming back and creating inaction again. Just as you need to identify when you have initially failed to take action, to remove fear for good, you need to keep monitoring and identifying times when you get stuck in your tracks.
A freezer can develop ice over time, but for it to work efficiently, you need to switch it off and defrost it from time to time to prevent the build up of ice getting too big.
Similarly, there will be times when your best intended plans have to be set to one side if urgent or more pressing matters crop up. The real skill in removing fear lies in not allowing any single given thing to always become a more pressing or urgent thing – and note that a pressing or urgent thing could subconsciously include watching 4 hours of TV or browsing Instagram or any other social media outlet.
If you let everything other than your desired goals and dreams always become more important, you may inevitably start to breed more inaction around your long term wish list. That inaction will start to build up like sheets of ice over time, subtly at first, but eventually forming another layer of thick permafrost.
Ignore the fear – focus on action
If you want to achieve something, then you need to focus on action, no matter how small that bit of action might be. Action is the oil that moves the cogs, that engage the mechanisms which ultimately turn your wheels forwards.
Eliminating fear isn’t about constantly focusing on the fear itself, or trying to work out in micro-detail how it all got there in the first place. Removing fear is about acknowledging that it is both safe and healthy to take whatever tiny actions are necessary to move you a millimetre, then a metre and then a kilometre or more closer to your goals and dreams.
Physical movement is good and healthy – it keeps our bodies in shape, our muscles working and our hearts beating. Eliminating fear through action is exactly the same and ultimately, by focusing on taking more steps forward, it will provide you with the healthy mindset through which your fear will eventually eliminate itself.
