Call Fear By Its Name
Before any work can be done on conquering fears, we must first identify them. It is far easier to come up with an effective solution when we understand what the problem is in the first place. A child who fears the monsters in her closet can overcome the fear much faster once she understands that it is the strange shadows in the dark toying with her mind. Then, all she has to do is close the closet door to eliminate the fear, whereas a night light could have only made the shadows bigger and scarier. When it comes to chasing our dreams, we need the right solution, not just any solution, which means we need to know exactly what the problem is to begin with.
Most fears are learned behaviors which is great because they can be unlearned. It means that fear can be defeated. When my son was a few weeks old, we thought he might have feared the dark. He seemed to get very upset when we turned off the bathroom light next to his pack-n-play and okay when we turned it back on. However, when we looked into it, we found out that he was too young to have any sense of fear for the dark, and in fact, total darkness was best for babies to sleep (and for me to sleep too). One day he will probably be afraid of the dark like most of us were, but then another day, he probably won’t be, and complete darkness will again be the best way for him to sleep.
Fear will come into our lives and it can exit our lives. We aren’t too young to have fears now. Most of us passed that age a long time ago. Fear can be a very real aspect of our lives. Our every fear is there because we have taken the time to learn it, though. Whether we learned that fear through a life-changing incident like a snake bite or through an ongoing education on poisonous snakes and where they lurk, every fear can be learned and unlearned.
I want to clarify when we are talking about fear in the context of chasing our dreams, I am not talking about the debilitating fears, the healthy fears or the fears of very realistic, daily terrors we can encounter in our world. If you suffer from debilitating fears, you should talk to a professional, licensed counselor about strategies to overcome them. I don’t have the education to help with those, and I would probably do more harm than good trying to tackle this type of fear. But I’ve been there, and talking helps, so you should seek that out if you ever find yourself in this situation. The healthy fears keep us from doing stupid things like riding a rollercoaster with the seatbelt unlocked. And there are fears we face with daily, realistic terrors in our lives, like knowing what our spouses can encounter when they go out in the line of duty. A counselor can help with those fears too, and I have certainly been there.
And while all those fears can be unlearned as well (though I would highly advise against unlearning the healthy ones), the fears that I want to talk about are the ones that we create and amplify for ourselves. These fears don’t debilitate us; they just stop us from pursuing what we want. They aren’t healthy because these fears prevent us from moving toward a healthier, happier and fuller life. And these fears aren’t daily terrors because we are unlikely to see on the news how someone literally died from the embarrassment of making a mistake.
These fears are in our life for one reason; they are trying to stop us from chasing our dreams. In these cases, fear is a crappy reason not to do something. Fear should not be the biggest reason that we avoid trying something we really want to do. My fear of putting my writing out there wasn’t debilitating. The most it caused was avoidance. I avoided taking steps to progress in writing. I avoided telling people what I was working on. I definitely avoided using the word writer anywhere in my job description. If that’s what you’re dealing with when chasing your dream, then I can help because I’m right there with you. And since you’re reading this on my website, you know I didn’t let the fear stop me.
It’s important to know what is causing the fear. Or a better way to look at this may be to focus on finding a name for your fear. When we appropriately identify our fear, we can accurately treat it. There are a lot of fears that we could face when chasing our dreams, but here are a few to get us started thinking about what we may be struggling with.
Fear of Failure
Fear of Success
Fear of Rejection
Fear of Change
Fear of the Unknown
Fear of Loss
Fear of Judgement
Fear of Not Being Enough
Fear of Letting People Down
Fear of Being Alone
Fear of the Worst
Fear of Pain
Fear of the Past
Fear of the Future
Fear of Losing Control
These fears all work together. I’m sure many of us are facing more than one. We can’t talk about a fear of failure without also acknowledging the fear of letting someone down or the fear of judgment. We can’t talk about a fear of loss without talking about fear of the worst of the fear of being alone. We can’t talk about a fear of losing control without talking about a fear of change or the fear of the unknown.
These fears intertwine to hold us in our place. They become roots that prevent us from taking steps forward. They convince us that it is better not to try in the first place. While it is tempting to think that if we don’t try anything, we won’t risk anything; the reality is that we will always risk our dreams with that strategy. But honestly, so many of these fears will come into our lives whether we are chasing something greater or not. There will always be fear of change when we move to a new duty station. The fear of loss will grab us tight when our spouses deploy. The fear of not being enough will plague us as we try to live up to whatever perfect spouse, parent, child, etc. standard that we have in our lives.
If we have to live with fear anyways, we might as well chase our dreams. We might as well try to do something to improve our lives, even if we risk one of these fears coming true. We can’t tackle our fear, though, until we know what it is. Now that we’ve identified it, we can take steps to overcome the fears holding us back as we chase our dreams.