FEAR – Don’t Let it Control You!

Fear. What is it? Can you touch it? Can you hold it? Can you
show it to another person? I can almost hear you from where I am
sitting. “No, no, no”. Okay then, so you can’t touch it, you
can’t hold it, and you can’t show it to another person. The
question then is, why? Why do we have fear? Fear is nothing
more than an emotion or a feeling that we hold in our mind. We
fear either the emotional or physical pain something may cause.
The problem is, these emotions and feeling affect the way we live
our lives. We fear doing certain things because we think we
might fail. This may be due to past failures we have actually
experienced or it may be due to failures we fear we might
experience.

I urge you to remember and live by the following motto. Fear
stands for,

False
Evidence that
Appears
Real

Most of the time what we fear, we have never even experienced!
Isn’t that crazy? You see, your mind has a hard time determining
whether you’ve actually experienced the failure or just imagined
it. Either way, you feel the physiological symptoms of the fear;
such as an upset stomach. Often, because we can imagine some
sort of failure, we believe it will come true, and then we don’t
even try! And that is what makes a failure; a person who is
afraid to try because they fear the potential of a negative
outcome. If you don’t at least try, you can never succeed.

“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of
which actually happened.”
- Mark Twain

The question now becomes who defines what ‘failure’ and ‘success’
is? You do right? Either you create the definition yourself or
you accept someone else’s definition. Is it true then that some
people create more difficult definitions of success and failure
for themselves than others do? You bet it is! Who do you think
leads a more successful live, Alex who defines success as,
“everyday that I wake up and I’m not six feet under, is a great
day.” Or Jeff, who defines success as, “I have to be earning at
least million dollars a year before I am successful.”

You guessed right again. Alex. You see, Alex has created her
own definition of what success means and that definition is
relatively easy to achieve! Therefore, in her mind, she is
successful everyday. Whereas Jeff, as per his own definition,
cannot be successful until he is earning one million dollars a
year. What are the chances that most of the ‘Jeff’s’ in the
world feel like failures on a daily basis because they are not
yet earning one million dollars a year? Now don’t get me wrong.
I’m not saying that you should not set high standards and goals
for yourself. What I am saying is that you have to be careful
that you ‘happily achieve, rather than achieve to be happy’.

The more difficult your definition of success is to attain, the
more fear you will attach to it. Don’t let your own definitions
limit you. Or even worse, the definitions of others. Create
your own definitions to make it harder to feel like a failure and
easier to feel like a success. That way you will attach less
fear to what you want in life. What would you attempt to do if
you knew you could not fail? Image what you can do in your life
with that type of belief system. Try thinking of every ‘failure’
as a success. That is, every time you ‘fail’ at something, you
have really succeeded because you have learned what does not
work. Therefore, you are closer to succeeding the next time you
try. Remember that the past does not equal the future.
Yesterday’s failure does not equal your future outcomes. Just
because you may have failed yesterday, or even five minutes ago,
it doesn’t mean you are going to fail again. Just learn from
what you did wrong and change your approach. Don’t fear the
past. The past is what has taught you how to succeed in the
future. Be fearless!

- Glen Hopkins

This article may be reprinted with the following attachment:
Copyright (c) 1999 Glen Hopkins
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