The Secret Weapon Fear Is Hiding from You
Fear gets a bad rap. Everyone’s trying to beat it, avoid it, or drown it out with motivational quotes and podcasts. But what if fear isn’t the enemy? What if fear is actually the friend you’ve been ignoring—because it’s uncomfortable to listen to? That’s what hit me one random day on the rowing machine when I dropped the handle mid-workout, grabbed my phone, and wrote down a single sentence that changed how I look at fear forever:
“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” ― George Addair
The more you do work creative work, the more attuned you are to picking up ideas from the unlikeliest of places.
This one is a quote I spotted during the opening or closing credits of last year’s film The Fall Guy. One of the production companies was using it on their title card.
Of course, as someone who’s battled against fear and anxiety most of their life, it stopped me dead in my tracks. Quite literally, because I was on my rowing machine at the time, with the film on the TV in front of me. I dropped the handle and made a note of this as an inspiration for an article.
And here we are!
Let’s get this straight before we go any further. Fear is a natural part of life. It might feel frustrating and life limiting, but it does serve a useful purpose when it comes to our survival.
It’s just that our brains are still built for life in prehistoric times, so they don’t know how on earth to deal with the world we now live in, in the 21st Century.
Our ancestors were the people who were the most fearful, you see, the ones who were most risk-averse. They were the folks who legged it at the slightest chance of danger, and who then lived long enough to have babies. And so on and so forth, throughout the generations.
And because the pace of change, particularly technological change, far outpaces evolutionary changes, our brains are lagging far behind and aren’t really fit for purpose, on some level, any more.
This is why things which aren’t actually dangerous or scary at all frighten the wits out of us. Rumours of redundancies at work, a snarky comment from a colleague, a nasty post on social media with its barbs aimed straight towards us. While these all might threaten your financial stability, or our instincts to fit in with the pack, they aren’t truly life threatening, but our poor beleaguered brains fly into full on survival mode regardless.
Which is totally and utterly exhausting, when it happens regularly.
For me, the first key to dealing more effectively with my fear & anxiety was in understanding the truth of this. Once you realise that your brain isn’t broken, that everyone else feels exactly the same as you do, and that this is entirely normal, then you can remove a layer of judgement, shame and guilt from the equation, which leaves you more mentally free to deal with the root issue itself.
I’ve come to see fear more and more as a sign post, rather than a stop sign. The fears that we feel when it comes to the things that we tell ourselves we want to do with our lives (a new job, retraining, learning to drive, moving house, a new relationship, a new hobby, starting your own business) all pop up when we decide that we’re going to take a step or two (or a leap!) out of our strictly defined comfort zone.
Because there’s unknown risk associated with the situation, that’s when our brains throw up their imaginary hands and start to yell at us to stop.
I have a few tricks to share which help me when this arises (and as someone who’s pushing out into this space as well as life/career coaching, it happens to me almost every single day. If I’m doing it right, anyway!)
A motto or a mantra
I love my mottos, mantras and quotes. So much so that I have (counts) three latin phrases permanently inked on my skin.
I also love the Peloton platform and in particular the instructor Christine D’Ercole. She runs online group training sessions about the use of mantras and how we speak to ourselves in our own heads.
Her mantra is:
I am, I can, I will, I do
Which I absolutely love. A few of my mottos I’ve been using just lately are:
You KNOW you can
Don’t flinch
If you feel the fear, you are not here
I’ll handle it! - Dr. Susan Jeffers
And of course the one which is at the start of this article is very useful.
I use these by peppering my house with PostIt notes with the phrase written on it, setting the wallpaper of my phone or laptop(s) with images with them written on it, and by writing them on the back of my hand in short form (e.g. YKYC or IYFTFYANH) as a reminder.
Just do 5 minutes
Sometimes just getting started is the hardest thing. This is when I make a deal with myself, just to spend 5 minutes on it. Once you’ve got that ball rolling, it’s often easier just to keep doing, and we human beings have a tendency to be completionists - having a task unfinished weighs heavily on our psyche - so we can then tap into that to keep us moving until the job is done.
Seems simple, I know, but it taps into how our brains work, leveraging them to our best advantage.
Use Mel Robbin’s 5-second rule
More of my articles about fear
You can find more of my hints & tricks when it comes to dealing with fear here.
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