Fear, the Great Teacher

Fear comes in all shapes and sizes. Fear is a necessary part of our alarm system that keeps us safe. Fear before public speaking or a job interview can give us a nudge to become more focused. 

However, fear is not a sustainable source of motivation. Achieving from a place of fear wears us down over time and can cause health issues.

It is not lost on me at this time in the world that fear is everywhere. We are surrounded by fear-based messaging. Fear has become normalized, and because of this, it can be hard to recognize.

Many of us have been programmed from an early age to operate out of fear. Fast forward to years of acting from a place of fear and scarcity, and it becomes challenging to even recognize that fear is driving us. The automated patterns of thought that have been chiseled in our minds, the critical inner voice, the anxious warnings that we hear begin to feel like truth. 

These messages that have become so ingrained in our minds and lives are not the truth. The good news is that we have a choice. 

Because our brains love to be on autopilot, the habituated thought patterns, though they keep us captive, become the path most traveled. Carving out a new path can feel heavy and impossible. In fact, we continuously search for evidence that the fear-based path is the right and real pathway. It isn’t. We have a choice. Yes, I have said that twice. 

You might be wondering, what is the anecdote? The pathway less traveled is one of trusting our own inner knowing and intuition. It is sinking into the deep wisdom of our nervous system and our bodily sensations that becomes our compass. 

Mind you, this is not an easy pathway, though it is more accessible than you might think. New behaviors and ways of thinking take time to implement and replace the old, well-traveled pathways. 

Here is an example of this in my own life…

I have had shoulder pain for years. I was fearful and certain that something was anatomically wrong with my body. I was sure I had torn something or had damage of some sort. As a result, I guarded my shoulder, and that likely caused even more muscle atrophy and pain. My methods were not working. Nonetheless, I still kept on with what I was doing because it was what I knew. The brain likes to take the easiest pathway forward - the automatic pathway. I began to convince myself that I was “falling into decrepitude” as my dear friend often says. 

Fast forward to this year… I got tired of nursing my shoulder. Protecting it at all costs and even from things I loved to do, like kayaking and yoga. I decided to make an appointment with a local physical therapist. 

The result? Who knew that I could reverse the pain I was having in my shoulder, which traveled to my neck, by strengthening the weak muscles in my shoulder area? I had been so careful to avoid exercising that part of my body that I did not trust this would make a difference. It took a lot of convincing. Change is often uncomfortable before we begin to settle into it and see the impact in our lives.

Well, here I am, and my shoulder pain (on most days) is gone or minimal. When I do my PT exercises, it vastly improves and the pain stops. 

It occurred to me that this is exactly what living in habituated fear patterns is like. It also reminded me that fear-based thought patterns are a choice. Yep, that might land hard for some of us. As I peel back my own layers of fear-based programming and learning, I see how much fear has led me. 

Today and every day is a new beginning. Noticing these patterns within me and leaning in with curiosity and compassion is the way to make these small and incremental changes. “Conversing with my fear and befriending it” has been challenging and not possible without the trusted partnerships with coaches and personal growth and learning that I do every day. 

We are not broken. We are simply programmed by fear. Unraveling these truths and holding ourselves with compassion, rather than arguing with parts of ourselves, is an invitation that makes all the difference.

If you are interested in peeling back your fear-based thinking and living more deeply in what is possible when we are fearlessly aligned, I would LOVE to chat with you. After all, we are all in this life together.