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Fade your Fears

What frightens you? What terrifies the living daylights out of you? Now, I’m not talking about ghostly, trick or treat type of spooking ourselves like we do at Halloween fear, I’m talking about the “mind numbing, stop us in our tracks” fear. How do you cope with those fears? Do they affect your daily life or do those fears only surface on certain occasions? What triggers the release of those fears? How do you overcome them? Or do you pretend for the most part that they don’t exist and put a brave face on your existence and plod along with your life?

My biggest fear at one point was dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, quiet dogs, excitable dogs, full grown dogs, puppy dogs (more than 2 weeks old), dogs running free, dogs on a leash, muzzled dogs. It didn’t matter a dog was a dog and dogs could:

1. bite you,
2. growl and bark at you,
3. jump up on you,
4. lick you (ugh!).

None of the above appealed to me by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I’d often break out in a sweat at the thought of it. My fear controlled my life at one point, so much so that I was refusing to walk outside my front door unaccompanied and even then had a melt-down when I’d see a dog.

When I was five I was walking around the corner from my house to a friend’s house. I’m small, only 5-foot and was always small for my age, so at five I was the height of the standard three year old, face-level with the average collie or labrador. I happened to walk into a pack of dogs, about six of them, snarling and barking at each other and to my five-year-old mind, me! So I ran out from behind a parked car onto the main road, into the path of an on-coming car. The driver got out and proceeded to scold me, but all I wanted to do was get away from the snarling dogs that had moved with me. I was rescued by a woman who’d seen what had happened and calmed the driver down enough to shoo the dogs away, and she took me home. My fear lived with me for over thirty-five years, and I didn’t know what had caused it, the original event having being suppressed in my memory, and it affected most trips I made from, going to school, to the shops and out socialising.

Now I still don’t like dogs, I’m not much of a lover of any type of pet, but I am not afraid of most dogs anymore. I fought my fear for a few reasons, the first being I wanted my life back. I deliberately walked where I knew there would be dogs (on a lead) just to get used to them and very much accompanied by someone who had no fear of any type of dog. Gradually over time my fear subsided to a wariness. When I was doing my NLP practitioner course I worked on the cause of my fear and got rid of it, so that I no longer have that fear sitting on my shoulders weighing me down and controlling any aspect of my life.

One of my cousins goes hysterical if she is told there is a spider in the room she is in and rushes out the door. Now thisparticular woman would pooh, pooh my fear of dogs with phrases like “it won’t touch you” and said dog smelling

my fear, would be heading straight for me, or “calm down, you’re making it nervous”.ME! making it nervous??? But these types of phrases don’t calm someone with an irrational fear down, they are more likely to add fuel to the fire, as the terrified person begins to justify their fear and sometimes paralysis. The only way to overcome these types of fear is to either confront it head on and overcome it that way or scramble the strategy of the fear.

But they are extreme fears, bordering on phobias. We have lesser fears and they drive our daily lives. I know growing up we were often confronted with causing mini scandals, the “what will the neighbours say?” syndrome. Don’t do something that might have somebody talking about you in a negative manner.  Why ever not? Dothey consult your

opinion before they decide to live their lives? What is it about you that is less important than someone else…and in your life no less? There is the fear of looking stupid or being laughed at, that crippling fear has often stopped people from excelling in various endeavours. There is the fear of success, yes, success. What will success mean to me? What will I have to give up when I’m successful, or what will it cost me on the way to success and am I prepared to pay that price? On the other side of the coin, there is the fear of failure (refer back to my first blog post – You Wouldn’t Do This To a Dog) that prevents us from taking those first steps.

So how does a person overcome those fears? A fear when faced head on often turns out to be a one hell of a letdown! What we anticipate and build up to, when confronted just doesn’t happen. We are feeding off the fear, hiding behind it, and like my last post – Eliminate your Excuses, we are using it to not take control of our lives. Most dogs, if they bother, sniff me and walk away, not the vicious attack I’d been expecting or imagining. We tend to run our fears as a mini-movie inour heads so change your movie.Successful people run a mini movie of them achieving their goals, so

run a success movie in your head. If you imagine your friends laughing at a comment you’ve made, change the movie to you telling a side-splitting joke and them laughing at that. If you fear failure or success, change the movie so that you incorporate all the practice and steps required into it and see yourself achieving the success you want, your way, without losing the things you want to hold onto on the way. If you fear what others will say about you, change the dialogue, instead of them being critical hear them saying nice things about you. Like everything it takes practice, until it becomes a habit, just like your old fear did!

If you find it difficult to do on your own, I see clients by appointment either face to face or via Skype.