Your Fear: True or False? Good or Bad?

Right now, I honestly believe that anyone who isn’t feeling some measure of fear is simply not awake. I also believe that too many people have been brain washed by pop psychology into thinking they are simply and always supposed to overcome it. 

Go ahead, overcome it if it is a false fear. But what if it is a true fear? And how do we know the difference?

Now is an important time to be figuring out how to know the difference. People are wondering how much fear is true or false regarding Covid. 

And then there are the people I know immersed in the unknown of new jobs and careers, wondering whether they are supposed to just forge ahead or heed their fears of these kinds of unknowns. 

Fear is an emotion that alerts us to danger and, in so doing, helped is to survive and to thrive as a species. After all, the ones whose fear made them run up a tree to get away from a predator got to eat lunch—rather than be lunch—on that day. They also lived to procreate, which is why we all have fear hardwired into our brains.

From Victor Frankl: 

Between stimulus and response there is a space. 

In that space is our power to choose our response. 

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

 In our response also lies our sense of aliveness and the safety of ourselves and others, and sometimes we have to put one over the other. 

So whether your fear is about something like whether to have or attend a social gathering, or your fear is about something like whether you should jump into the new job because you are afraid of what is happening with the old, we do not want to react like we are in the jungle. And we do not have to. 

Once we stop automatically judging fear as something to overcome or, conversely, stop letting it paralyze us altogether, we can consider fear an ally. Then we can respond with an investigative process that helps us figure out whether fear’s message is onto something true or false—and behave accordingly.

As always, we want the higher, executive functioning brain in charge of this process, and consequent action, so don’t forget your ‘Power Breathing” to get you into that zone. (If you don’t have this exercise yet, you can grab one in the “Complimentary” box at madelaineweiss.com) 

Warm wishes,

Madelaine