The Basis of Fear and How To Overcome It

Fear is a popular coaching topic. Even when it's not for trauma or phobia, my clients usually end up discussing fear with me because every person eventually finds that what limits them the most is fear.

While the feeling of fear seems like one identifiable experience, there are actually multiple facets to it. For example the fear you feel when it's your turn to speak in a group setting is different from the fear you feel when you're about to be interrogated by a HR person in a meeting with no title.

Which is also different from the fear of cockroaches and even that is different from the fear you experience during a rough turbulence in flight. We can try and verbally differentiate between the feelings, and who better to do that job than writers?

Many writers and wordsmiths have already categorized sub-feelings inside fear. Stephen King offered that there is Gross-Out, Horror, and Terror. But this seems too literary, because it doesn't really describe the feeling you get when you're about to submit your resume to a job application. Or the feeling you get before a phone call from the vet who said they would call after they take a look at your dog.

No matter how individually different they all are, they can all be identified as fear. And if they can all be identified as fear, there must be a unifying factor that is shared among all of them. My offering to you today is that fear is the inner experience of learned consequences triggered by ignorance.

What does this mean? We first have to discuss ignorance. Ignorance is less about stupidity, what I mean is genuine not knowing. For example, I've written multiple times about my cockroach phobia. My fear is so interesting to me and so when I dive in deeper about why I feel so much fear, I realized that I have this image of the cockroach diving into my mouth.

So what's the scary thing about that? I'm intentionally trying to be dense here, I need myself to answer that question because somehow the fear seems to stem from that. And I don't have an answer outside of "well it's just fucking gross and gruesome". But why is it scary? It's very hard to come up with an answer for that, because it defies logic.

Over the span of a few days I realized that I don't know what would happen to me if I ate a cockroach. How could I live with myself in the eternal grossness? Strangely, it is at this point the fear just vanished because this exact topic is something I studied with myself over and over when I was learning Buddhism. The dharma says that regardless of what happened in the past, I can be happy. So if happiness is unconditional, I know that I can be happy even if I ate a cockroach.

What if I fucking die? Well, a quick googling revealed that I won't die, the stomach acid will likely dissolve everything and I might be a bit sick potentially due to bacterial diseases like salmonella. But also, even that helped me stop fearing because I've studied my relationship with death during my meditations.

I used to be a nervous wreck during interviews. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom mid-interview so many times because of IBS. Why was I so nervous? Because I didn't know what they were going to ask me. Strangely the fear and anxiety vanishes once I know what the question is, but the moment I'm done answering I get nervous again. Because I don't know.

I used to be generally anxious about my family dying. If my mom didn't pick up the phone, I'd automatically worry first about "what if she's dead?". Again, because I don't know what I'd do with myself if that happened. Now that I know better and have experienced a few deaths, I know what to do and I don't fear that scenario anymore.

So a big component of fear is ignorance. But the thing is, even when we're not afraid of things we generally are in a state of ignorance. For example, you might not be super afraid right now but do you know what's gonna happen in the next five years? You have no clue, but since you don't focus on the ignorance all the time you're not necessarily scared all the time.

Fear starts introducing itself when the ignorance becomes more and more apparent. But as I said above, fear stems from learned consequences to ignorance. There are different consequences to not knowing. For example, if you didn't know that you hadn't locked the door and your house was broken into, that's a hefty price to pay for ignorance.

My parents didn't really beat me for bad grades, they just relied on the good old psychological burdening. But when I went to cram school for the first time I experienced physical violence as a consequence for not knowing the answer for something. It doesn't have to be as extreme as this, maybe your friends can call you dumb for not knowing something or someone you respect can be disappointed by your ignorance.

These consequences to ignorance, especially when tied with strong emotions, become a trigger to help you do your best in avoiding it in the future. The thing is, generally the avoidance is in escapism rather than finding the way out; what I mean is, if I have an upcoming test with a teacher who's beaten my ass multiple times, instead of trying to study as much as possible to make my knowledge foolproof I wonder about ways to call in sick on the day of the test or flunk out. This is what causes people to drop out of commitments, change plans, or however else they fall back from their plans.

Now that you know this, you can predict how one could become fearless. Half of the fear was addressed above, you turn your ignorance into knowing. How about the other half, of the consequence? Emotions that are consciously witnessed and respected without judgment will have a deep transformation inside of you that will be nourishing to you instead of weakening.

This might all sound abstract to you, and I agree; we don't talk about these things enough to make it sound concrete and actionable. The good thing is, helping you actually experience this so you actually overcome your fears is on the top of my to-do list for the upcoming Launch Pad program. After four weeks of training with me starting January 17th, you'll have a completely different relationship with things you used to fear.

Even if you're not interested in training with me via Launch Pad, you can still experience fearlessness in practice with me through 1:1 life coaching. Schedule some time to build your plan with me, and I'll show you what it feels like so you can practice towards it.