On Fear: A Broader Perspective

Most of us are well aware that fear is a severe detriment to achieving our goals.

As writer and speaker Stephanie Melish puts it:

“fear is an idea-crippling, experience-crushing, success-stalling inhibitor inflicted only by yourself.”

Thus, being well-meaning and ambitious, we attempt to identify our fears and curtail them. We give it some thought, but mainly, we look for obvious phobias. If we don’t have any real phobias or fears, we conclude we’re “actually doing a pretty good job,” and move on with our lives.

Then, six months down the line, we wonder:

Why am I not acting on my intentions? This dream is important to me. I don’t feel afraid of doing this… Why am I not doing it?

The problem is, most of the fears that hold us back the most are not obvious phobias, but subtle cultural or evolutionary biases we’re not even aware of.

Rather than symptoms like trepidation or anxiety, these “background fears” deliver something far worse to our long-term happiness and fulfillment: in-action.

For example, a common background fear that affects nearly all people to some degree is caring what other people think.

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this. It’s an evolutionary instinct from a time when our survival depended on fitting in and cooperating with our hunter-gatherer tribe. It enables us to be caring, helpful, appropriate, and cooperative. Which are all great things.

Too much value on what other people think, however, will stop your aspirations dead in their tracks. It will stop you from chasing your dreams (or keep you chasing dreams that aren’t yours) on a quest for status, recognition, or some other external reward.

You may think you don’t have any fears in the traditional sense, but dig deeper.

Once you’ve identified the fear, and realized the degree it’s slowing you down, the matter is usually resolved with courage and practice.

What are you self-conscious about? When or where do you take yourself too seriously? What external forces influence you more than you’d care to admit?

Asking yourself questions like these periodically helps identify lingering insecurities that, while small, can have outsize negative effects on the progress you are committed to making.

Only when we’ve identified what’s influencing us are we in the position to exercise the courage and practice needed to overcome it.