Fear

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt


Fear is one of those emotions that most of us are trying not to have. Because it doesn’t feel good, it’s been coded as a so-called “negative” emotion. And we’re so keen to avoid this negative emotion that we find ourselves avoiding situations that elicit fear for us, so we code the fear-inducing situations as “negative” as well.

What happens then is we end up being afraid of fear, so we start building meta-levels of fear. And then we’re no longer just scared, but we’re scared of feeling scared. And we can even make ourselves scared of feeling scared of feeling scared… can you see how easy it is to end up with more fear, instead of less fear, when we see feeling fear as a bad thing?
But, fear isn’t bad at all. All emotions have a positive purpose that serves us. Have you ever thought about the positive purpose of your fear?

Fear alerts us to threats

Sometimes our fear can be a really useful gut-response that helps us anticipate and respond more quickly to a genuine threat. If something is unfamiliar, it might be dangerous, so, whenever we’re in unfamiliar territory, fear crops up and alerts us to pay attention. And of course, from a survival point of view, that’s really useful.

Fear is a signal you’re learning

Because we’re designed this way, we tend to respond to ALL unfamiliar experiences with fear – even if they’re not dangerous. So long as you’re taking yourself into new territory, and growing, you’ll always feel some fear along the way. From a creativity point of view, fear is useful because it makes you more alert when you’re learning and growing. And fear is a signal that you’re learning. In fact, if you’re telling yourself you’re learning in a particular area of your life, yet you’re not feeling any fear in that area of your life, you’re probably not learning.

Fear lets you know what’s important to you

A third purpose of fear is that fear let’s us know what’s really important to us. Think about it: when something isn’t important to you, you probably don’t care what happens with it, and you won’t feel fear then. It’s the stuff that’s closest to our hearts, that we really care about, that we feel the most fear about – because it matters to us how things work out. With so many choices available to us these days, alot of creative people find it difficult to figure out what’s really important to them and decide what they want in life. A really counter-intuitive, but easy way to figure whether something is genuinely important to you is to notice how much fear you have about it. The more important it is to you, the bigger your fear will probably be.