Understanding & Overcoming Fear

Fear occurs as a response to something threatening, dangerous or harmful. Fear can cause a person to feel nervous, anxious and can even impair their bodily functions such as the ability to think clearly, speak with a steady voice and keep a steady hand.

Nobody likes to feel fearful because it is a negative and unpleasant emotion. However, it is also a very useful emotion to have because the main purpose of fear is to alert your attention to, and prepare your body for, a threat which could potentially harm you or even kill you.

If you did not feel afraid in certain situations you would end up doing things that needlessly endangered your life, thereby increasing your risk of suffering from injury or death. So in other words, you need to feel fear in order to keep you alive.

The trouble is, not all the fears that people experience are reactions to genuine threats against their life or threats that could cause them bodily harm. These types of fears are known as “irrational fears”, because once you start thinking about them logically you soon realize that there is really nothing to be afraid of.

Irrational fears can also be very self-limiting, because they tend to restrict or prevent you from doing certain things in life that you would like to do.

For example, a person who is afraid of flying, but at the same time dreams of travelling the world, will be unable to do so unless they drive or sail in a ship. But because these forms of travel take such a long time and can also be very expensive, that person may never have the time or money to live out their dream.

As a result, a person whose life is controlled by fear can end up missing out on many opportunities and experiences in life, and then spend the rest of their life filled with regret and wondering what might have been.

Unlike real fears, irrational fears serve no beneficial purpose. So these fears must be eliminated if you ever hope to achieve the goals, aims and objectives that you set for yourself and fulfill your true potential in life.

Are You Fulfilling Your True Potential?

No two people are alike, and because we are all different, each and every one of us is uniquely capable of achieving some form of greatness.

You may look at someone and wish that you had what they had, but if you look closer at yourself, at what makes you unique, you will see that you have things not even they have. And that you are capable of things not even they are.

Your uniqueness as a person therefore acts as your blueprint for what you are capable of achieving in life. And because you are unique, no one can achieve exactly the same thing as you, in exactly the same way. Just like how you can’t achieve exactly the same thing as another person has, in same way that they did.

What this means is that every person on earth has the potential to achieve something great, something that only their uniqueness allows them to do.

But as you are probably already very well aware, not everyone manages to fulfill their true potential. As a result, some people will go throughout much of their life never fully satisfied with who and what they are.

Why Aren’t People Satisfied?

One of the main reasons for a lack of satisfaction and fulfillment in life, comes not from lesser qualities or traits that a person may possess, but rather from an ignorance of them.

Instead of focusing on what makes them unique, and what they are individually capable of, many people make the mistake of comparing themselves to others who, in their eyes, appear to be more successful than they are.

The trouble with making such comparisons is that whilst you can use other people’s success to motivate you, if you forget about your own uniqueness and just concentrate on their strengths, this comparison can very easily lead to feelings of inadequacy and may even have the opposite effect to what was intended, de-motivation.

Eventually, these thoughts inevitably lead to fear. Fear about oneself. Fear about what may come in the future, and fear about other people.

When you fear something, it is a natural reaction to try to move away from it, to avoid it. So if your life becomes filled with fear, which direction do you think your life will move, forwards or backwards?

Fear Is Holding You Back!

Fear holds you back from what only you are uniquely capable of achieving, and one of the main reasons for such fear is because a person has forgotten who they are and what they are.

In other words, they have forgotten their own unique blueprint, and instead, have tried to use someone else’s blueprint. What they don’t realize is that you can’t use someone else’s blueprint, because each of us has our own blueprint which allows only us to achieve a unique form of greatness. So by ignoring your own blueprint, you are essentially ignoring your own potential greatness.

Due to the debilitating effects of fear, and the limiting beliefs that are often associated with it, fear is, without exaggeration, the greatest enemy of all human potential because more people are held back by real or imaginary fears than any other factor.

Types Of Fear

Did you know, that when you are born you only have two inbuilt or innate fears? A fear of falling, and a fear of loud noises. These fears are built into your DNA, and are passed down from generation to generation as a survival mechanism.

The only purpose of these fears is to keep you alive by alerting you to potential dangers, and then creating an emotion within you that motivates you to avoid danger. Now, think about the implications of this for the fears which you currently have. If you were not born with the fears that you have today, where did they come from?

The answer, is that at some point in your life you acquired them. Some event in your past caused you to associate a pain or danger with whatever it is that you fear, and so now you are strongly motivated to avoid experiencing those emotions again. In other words, you learned your fear.

The good news, is that for anything which you learn you can also unlearn. But first, you need to understand your fear, what caused your fear and what options are available for to you to overcome it.

So let’s now begin by briefly looking at the three main types of learned fear: external, internal and subconscious fear.

External Fears

Perhaps the most easily recognized fear is external fear. This type of fear is caused by something outside of you which you are strongly motivated to avoid. These fears are usually called phobias. Some examples of phobias, or extreme external fears, could include a fear of spiders, a fear of flying or a fear of rats.

Generally speaking, all of these fears tend to occur after some negative experience with them in the past.

For example, as a child I used find spiders fascinating. I would look at them in their webs, and collect them in jars. But one day, as I was trying to collect a spider from its web in my garden, it somehow managed to get on my finger, wrap its legs around my finger tip and then bite me!

I frantically tried to shake the spider off my finger for what seemed like an eternity. When I finally did remove it, I saw two small puncture marks where the spider bite had been made. I then quickly ran inside the house to see my mum.

Since that experience, plus a few other bad experiences with spiders (and the film Arachnophobia!), I soon learned to associate spiders with pain and discomfort. In other words, these bad experiences taught me that spiders were bad and that I should avoid them. They taught me to fear spiders.

Fortunately, external fears are relatively simple, in principle, to overcome, providing you have a lot of determination and courage. Later, we shall explore some techniques that you can use to overcome such fears.

Internal Fears

Internal fears can be generalized as a form of low self-esteem. They are triggered by external factors that create internal feelings of self-doubt.

They make you feel incapable of doing or achieving something, and so most of the time, you don’t even try to make a start at something. If you do try, you will do so half heartedly and with the expectation of failure.

For example, you may want to apply for a new job, start your own business or ask someone out on a date, but because you doubt your own ability to complete the task successfully, you never bother to make an effort to try. In other words, you give up before you even begin.

Low self-esteem is often a reflection of how your parents treated you as a child, and to a lesser extent, the things that you experience throughout your life.

This is because the most important and influential years, in terms of character development, are your early childhood and teenage years of life because that is when your mind is most impressionable and still developing.

It is important to understand however, that most parents do not deliberately try to make their children fearful in later life. But often, parents will do so inadvertently through their efforts to raise us in the best way that they know how. Usually, this means treating us as they were treated by their parents.

One of the most harmful things that a parent can do is to use destructive criticism far more often than they use praise. They may spank their child, tell them off or even send them to the “naughty chair” as punishment.

All of these things are done in an effort to guide the child through life, so that they will learn to associate something they shouldn’t do with pain and thereby become motivated to avoid doing it again.

However, whilst discipline certainly is a necessary and important factor in raising children, an overbalance of destructive criticism and punishment in relation to praise and love, ultimately leads to feelings of inadequacy and insecurity in the developing child.

Later in life, these feelings translate into fears of failure, rejection, lack of self-worth and self-doubt. In other words, low self-esteem. The good news is that by understanding, examining and learning to improve your own self-esteem, a lot of these internal fears can be overcome.

Subconscious Fears

A subconscious fear is a belief that has been accepted by your subconscious mind, usually as a result of something you experienced or were told as a child. The most common manifestation of a subconscious fear is self sabotage.

Self sabotage occurs when you begin to achieve more than your subconscious beliefs think you should achieve. So for example, if you always seem to get close to success, or even experience success for some time but then do something to mess it all up, then it is likely that your subconscious beliefs are sabotaging your life as a result of a fear of success.

Like internal and external fears, self sabotage tends to occur when some negative emotion is linked to change or to a particular event in your life. As a result, these subconscious fears motivate you (at the subconscious level) to avoid this change or event and go back to where you subconsciously believe you should be.

A good example of this can be found with money. Some lottery winners will spend all their money within a few years, and  then end up back where they started before they won the jackpot.

Because of their limiting subconscious beliefs that told them they were unworthy of such wealth, their subconscious took them back to a level where they subconsciously believed they should be at by getting rid of all their millions.

I like to call this process your “subconscious thermostat”, because your subconscious beliefs will always cause you, on average, to achieve a certain level of success or happiness in life. That is of course, unless you actively take steps to adjust that thermostat.

What Are You Controlled By?

Since we are largely controlled by our dominant emotions, if you have been raised from childhood to be fearful or experienced things in the past which created fear within you, then that fear will, to varying degrees, control your life and dictate your future actions.

Depending on the type of fear that you have, this control will usually come in the form of some kind of restriction on your life. This restriction will then prevent you from doing or achieving the things you would like to do, thereby preventing you from realizing the full potential of your unique blueprint.

Breaking Free From The Shackles Of Fear

If fear is a natural reaction to avoid something, then the opposite of fear is a natural desire to experience or accept something. In other words, the opposite to fear is love. When your life is driven by love it is expressed as desire, and strong desires will always overcome any fears that you may have.

For example, if your house is burning down, then a natural reaction would be to fear the fire because it could burn you. If however, your son or daughter was inside the house, your love for them and the desire created by that love, would more than likely be strong enough to overcome your fear of getting burned and thereby allow you to save your child.

For internal fears, love is expressed as self-love or high self-esteem. It is a strong belief in yourself and your ability to do what you set out to do, regardless of any obstacles that might stand in your way. When you truly love and believe in yourself, your desire will be strong enough to overcome any fear that you encounter.

For external fears, love is expressed as a desire to experience something rather than to avoid it. This does not mean that you must fall in love with the thing you fear, but rather, that you accept it for what it is and are able to react appropriately around it. It means being able to control yourself, rather than having your fear control you.

When a person has this level of self-control they are said to have displayed courage, because they stood up to the thing they feared rather than running away from it.

What Is Courage?

Throughout history, all great human achievement has been accomplished by people who have faced their fears, acted in the face of uncertainty and still dared to move forward.

These people were no different to you or I. They had a fear, but learned to control it and overcome it so that they could move their lives forward rather than allowing those fears to hold them back.

Take Winston Churchill for example. During the 2nd World War, the small island of Britain was threatened with invasion by the seemingly unstoppable German army. An army who had already conquered most of Europe. Rather than giving in and surrendering to what seemed like almost certain defeat, Churchill defied the Germans in one of his most famous speeches by saying:

“…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…”

Was Churchill scared or fearful when he made this bold and defiant speech? You bet he was! For there was a lot to fear for a tiny island like Britain, who at the time stood alone against Hitler’s dream for global conquest.

It was Churchill’s willingness to keep fighting, and the belief he inspired in the British people, that ultimately kept Britain a free country throughout the war. Had Churchill wavered and given into his fear, Hitler would most likely have conquered Britain and the war could have ended up very differently.

Through this example, Churchill showed that courage comes not from a lack of fear, but rather, from a control of fear and the ability to react in an appropriate manner. This is the very basis of overcoming any fear, as you can only overcome a fear by standing up to it. If you run away from a fear, its power and control over you will grow.

Are You More Fearful Than You Should Be?

Many fears are caused by ignorance because people are scared of what they don’t know. The reason for this is simple. When your brain is only given a few pieces of information, it tends to fill in the rest of the details by itself.

For example, when you look at a picture on a computer screen, what you are actually seeing is a series of tiny dots. However, because the dots are so small, your brain fills in the gaps and you see it as a complete picture.

The exact same principle applies when it comes to fear. If you start worrying about something which you don’t have all the information about, then your brain will fill in the gaps, and before you know it, you are imagining things which may not even happen or have no chance of happening.

So in order to stand the best chance of overcoming a fear, you need to find out as much as you can about the thing you fear. This way, you will be able to react on the basis on complete rather than incomplete information.

In turn, this will then prevent you from worrying about things that you shouldn’t be worrying about. It will also help to reduce the level of fear that you experience by making you aware of exactly what could happen, rather than making you imagine or guess what might happen.

Using The Power Of Psychology

A simple exercise to increase your awareness of the true reality regarding a particular fear, is to write down on a piece of paper several headings for each major area of your life. For example, some headings that you can use are: health, money, relationships and career.

Spread these headings out across the top of your paper evenly, and then draw a vertical line between them to separate each category. Alternatively, you can use a separate piece of paper for each heading.

The purpose of this exercise is to clearly identify all the different fears that you currently have, with the ultimate aim of eliminating them one by one.

Next to each fear, write down exactly what it is that you are afraid could happen. For example, you might be fearful of looking foolish, being embarrassed, suffering from harm or even dying. Whatever it is that you feel fearful of, write it down so that you can clearly see the factors that are contributing towards your fear.

Now, this is where the psychology comes in.

Each fear factor that you have written down is what is known as a “driver” because they are responsible for making you feel anxious, apprehensive or terrified about something. The more drivers you have, the more likely you are to fear something and the stronger your feeling of fear will be.

For each of your drivers, think about whether they are a real threat to you. For example, if you were made to look foolish in a particular situation, what’s the worst that could happen? Would you be able to recover and get on with the rest of your life?

What you will most likely discover, is that a large majority of the fear drivers that you have identified aren’t really a threat to your life at all. So if you were to eliminate each of those drivers one by one, you would greatly reduce the amount of fear that you feel towards something or even be able to eliminate that fear completely.

Feeling The Fear

Susan Jeffers wrote an excellent book about dealing with fear called “Feel the fear, and do it anyway”, and the title of this book is worth remembering because it can be very useful in helping you to overcome irrational fears.

For each of the fears that you previously identified, the final step of the exercise is to actually go out and expose yourself to the very thing that you fear. There are several ways that you can do this, which we shall now start to explore.

What Are You The Most Afraid Of?

Whilst you may be able to categorize your fears into one group or another, in reality, most people will have layered fears that exist at differing levels of intensity.

The most dominant fear will mask the less dominant fears, until the dominant fear has been overcome. This then causes a less dominant fear to rise to the surface and become more noticeable. This process will repeat itself until all of your fears have been overcome.

Basically, what this all means is that you will be more fearful of some things than others. Your biggest fear is always the most noticeable, because it is the thing that you are most afraid of and so is the most prominent in your mind.

But once you overcome that fear, you start to notice the other things which you are less fearful of, but previously may not have given much attention to. As all fears restrict life in some way, the level of restriction that you experience will therefore be determined by your most dominant fear.

So to successfully overcome all of your fears, you need to be willing to take a multi layered approach whereby you sequentially tackle each fear that appears to be negatively impacting your life.

So right now, decide upon what your dominant fear is. Think about which fear is having the biggest negative impact on your life? This is the fear that you should work on overcoming first, because doing so will bring the biggest positive impact to your life in terms of lifting the restriction that fear has imposed upon you.

The Fear Scale

Once you have decided upon your most dominant fear, give yourself a fear score of 1-10, whereby 10 is maximum fear, and 1 is no fear. This is your starting point, and what you will be working on lowering to an acceptable level.

However, it is important to point out that to begin with, you should not necessarily expect to reduce all fears to a level 1 (no fear) immediately. It is far better to aim to reduce a fear to a moderate level.

For example, if you start out at a level 10, then you should aim to reduce your fear to a level 5 or 6, whereby you are able to control your own  thoughts and actions in response to a fearful situation, rather than letting that fear completely control you.

This form of fear management will have the most impact on your life, because even though you are not initially removing a fear completely, you are removing the restrictive impact it is having on your life.

So bear that in mind, and do not become discouraged if you still feel fearful around whatever it is that you are trying to overcome. Initially, what you are trying to do is to reduce and control your fear, rather than completely overcome it in one go.

The added benefit of this approach is that once you do manage to reduce your fear to an acceptable level, it will then become far easier to eliminate it completely. So think of your fear as gradually decreasing in intensity, until it is at such a low-level that it no longer bothers you anymore and so eventually just disappears.

Making The Magnetic Flip

Fear causes a natural reaction that strongly motivates us to avoid something. When we fear something, we want to run away, hide, or do whatever it takes to not experience it. This could involve traveling by car to avoid the anxiety caused by flying, or not asking someone out on a date to avoid the risk of rejection and looking foolish.

The trouble is, when you run away from a fear it tends to become more powerful. And because you are running away, you are not in a position to try to overcome it. So as long as you are repelled from a fear, your life will always be affected by it.

This is just like trying to push two south-facing magnets together. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get them to stick together, and the moment you let go, they quickly shoot apart.

So this is the first and hardest barrier that you must overcome, and in order to do so, you must flip one of the magnets over so that north will attract to south.

This magnetic flip is achieved by your desire to overcome a fear. If however, your desire is weak and your belief in yourself wavers, then you will be unable to flip the magnet and you will always be repelled from the thing you fear.

What’s Your Reason?

Before continuing with this article, please ensure that you strongly desire to overcome whatever it is that you fear. One of the best ways to do this, is to write your fear down and then list all the ways that it is negatively impacting your life.

Think of how this fear is affecting you from achieving the greatness your unique blueprint has set out for you. Then make a list of how your life will be positively impacted once this fear is removed, or reduced to an acceptable level.

Once you have thought this through, and your desire is strong, then congratulate yourself! You have just flipped the magnet and moved yourself down a level on the fear scale!

Confronting What You Are Fearful Of

In order to overcome your fear, you must be willing to face your fear and to expose yourself to it. But remember, at this early stage there will still be quite a strong repulsion to the thing you fear. This is normal and to be expected.

Your goal now is to start increasing the level of magnetic attraction between you and the thing you fear, whilst at the same time, learning to reduce and manage the fear you feel.

Below we shall look at several techniques which can be used to do this.

The Biology Of Fear

The techniques that we shall soon discuss, will train your body to react in an appropriate way around the thing that you fear.

When you reduce or eliminate your fear, your body will remain calm when you are exposed to something that you dislike and would rather avoid. But this can only be done through repeated exposure and a process of desensitization.

The reason for this is because when you are scared of something, it is an automatic reaction. It is not something that you try to feel. It just happens automatically in response to something.

Why you feel scared is because the body thinks that you are in danger, and so it alerts you to the perceived danger by making you notice it and become fully aware of it. Your body then continues this reaction by increasing your heart rate, breathing and by pumping blood into your muscles, so that you can quickly run away or defend yourself.

This is an inbuilt survival mechanism that is hardwired into your DNA, which is also why it occurs without you even thinking about it. This survival mechanism is called the “fight or flight” response, and is designed to keep you alive in the face of danger.

The fear that you currently have is inappropriately triggering this mechanism, because you have somehow linked the thing you fear to a pain of some kind. So whenever you are presented with it, your survival mechanism kicks in because it thinks that it needs to protect you from a danger.

By using the following techniques, you will rewire the connections in your brain so that you do not trigger this mechanism. The fight or flight response however, does not just switch itself off immediately. Rather, it fades gradually through a process of desensitization.

This means that it “learns” over time, and with experience, that something is definitely not a threat. So don’t expect your fear to disappear immediately, because the biology of fear does not allow for this to occur.

Understanding The Desensitization Process

Suppose as you are reading this article someone quickly runs up behind you and shouts BOO! Your natural reaction to this would most likely be to jump up and be startled. A few minutes later as you are reading another article, that same person comes up and shouts BOO again! This time you still jump, but you weren’t quite as startled as you were the first time.

After getting quite annoyed at this person, you turn around and start reading some more articles. Just as you find something that looks really interesting, you hear “BOO” again! But this time you don’t jump. Why? Because you have been desensitized to the “BOO”, and so it no longer has the same effect on you.

What occurred in this example, was your body reacting in an appropriate way to something that it perceived as a threat towards your safety. As a result, your body strongly alerted you to the first “BOO”.

The second time you heard the “BOO” you still jumped, because you had not yet learned to fully classify the “BOO” as having no threat to you (as harmless). Because you were not harmed by the first “BOO”, the shock that you experienced from the second “BOO” was less and your recovery from that shock was quicker.

The third time you heard the “BOO”, you knew it wasn’t anything that could hurt you. It was just someone trying to scare you. As a result, your body quickly learned that it does not need to ready itself to escape a danger, and so you didn’t jump or even look around.

This simple example shows you the basic principle of desensitization, and by using the following techniques, you will learn how to teach your body to react appropriately in response to a fearful situation. This is why in order to overcome your fears, you must face them.

So let’s now begin by looking at two techniques that are used to confront fear: Immediate exposure and gradual exposure.

Immediate Exposure Technique

The immediate exposure technique is perhaps the most brutal and anxiety producing way of overcoming a fear. As the name suggests, this technique involves exposing yourself to the thing you fear immediately and at a high intensity. Do not expect any mercy with this technique, it is harsh!

For an external fear, such as a fear of spiders, this would involve holding a spider in your hand, or letting it crawl all over your body. For an internal fear, such as a fear of asking a woman out on a date, this would involve going up to as many women as possible with the aim of meeting them again at some point in the future.

As you can imagine, this technique tends to cause lots of immediate anxiety and panic, as you are being put close to something you strongly repel. The natural reaction to the emotions that you experience are to get away as soon as possible.

The reason why this technique is so brutal is not because of the immediate discomfort it causes, but because for this technique to be effective it must be performed repeatedly.

This technique works because by repeatedly exposing yourself to the thing that you fear, you desensitize yourself to it by teaching your body that it poses no real threat. After repeated exposures, the fight or flight response gradually decreases until it is no longer activated when you are confronted with the previously fear creating situation.

Advantages & Disadvantages

One of the main advantages of using the immediate exposure technique, is that people tend to overcome their fears far more rapidly than using other techniques. Typically, about 5-10 exposures are sufficient to produce very noticeable results.

Another advantage is that because you are thrown immediately into the deep end, you have less time to worry or think about your fear. This can be very beneficial, because thinking too much about your fears can make them appear worse than they actually are.

However, it is important to understand that there is a risk when using this technique, especially if you are doing it alone and without anyone to support you.

For example, if during an immediate exposure you have a very bad experience, then that experience could amplify your original fear and make it worse. It could even prevent you from taking any future action to try to overcome your fear.

Gradual Exposure Technique

The gradual exposure technique is the complete opposite to the immediate exposure technique. Although it works in the same way, by desensitizing the fight or flight response. Instead of exposing yourself immediately to the thing that you fear, with this technique you gradually expose yourself to what you fear in a series of small steps.

This method tends to be favored by psychologists who help people overcome their fears, because it is a much more gentle and relaxed approach. The patient can do what they are comfortable with, and with a little help and motivation from the psychologist, will eventually overcome their fear.

However, the disadvantage of using this technique is that it takes a lot more time for the fear to be overcome. Also, if you are trying to do this by yourself and have no one to motivate you, then you are unlikely to push yourself forward far enough for any real progress to be made.

Another disadvantage is that because you are taking your time with the exposure, you also have lots of time to worry! Which again, can make things worse.

The trick when using this technique is to continually push yourself to a level where you feel uncomfortable, but are still able to control yourself and stand your ground.

So for an example, lets take someone with an extreme fear of spiders. Whereas the immediate exposure technique would require for them to immediately hold a spider, a gradual exposure technique would first involve them just thinking about spiders or looking at pictures of spiders.

They would then be placed in the same room as a spider, and over a series of sessions, move closer to it until they felt comfortable standing right next to it. The next steps would involve moving their hand closer to the spider, but doing so in their own time, and to the level they are comfortable with.

This process would be repeated until they are eventually able to hold the spider for longer and longer periods.

Which Technique Should You Use?

The most common method of overcoming fear is the gradual exposure technique. Simply because it is easier to do and less anxiety producing. The immediate exposure technique is used far less frequently, and when it is used, tends to occur by accident.

For example, you fall into a well, break your leg and can’t move. It just so happens that you have a fear of rats, and this well is full of them!

After lots of screaming, you will eventually calm down and learn to deal with the rats until you get out. From this experience, you will likely overcome your fear of rats just like Batman overcame his fear of bats.

But there is also the danger that this immediate exposure could leave you severely traumatized, thereby making your fear of rats even worse.

You Must Face Your Fears

As was mentioned at the start of this article, in order to overcome your fears you and you alone must face them. There is no getting around this fact, and so you must be prepared and willing to experience some form of anxiety as you start the process of overcoming your fear.

No one is saying that this will be easy, but if you follow any of the techniques listed above, then you will at some point in the future overcome the fears which you currently have.

This is what you should keep in mind to motivate you. The day that you will be set free from the restrictions that fear is having on your life. The day that you start achieving the greatness set out by your unique blueprint.

There will be times when you feel like giving in, but just remember that this is a natural reaction and one you must fight. You have to keep going until your body and mind learn that it is reacting inappropriately. So be patient and keep moving forward, no matter how small the steps you take each day may be.

The Power Of Mental Visualization

Mental visualization is simply a method for imagining situations or events that occurred in the past or may occur in the future, and is widely used in the field of neuro linguistic programming (NLP) for reprogramming the mind.

The reason why visualization can be so effective is because the brain cannot differentiate between an event that is real and one that is imagined, and this is something that has been confirmed scientifically with brain imaging scans such as fMRI scans.

These brain scans show that the same regions of the brain become activated when a person is doing a task in real life or if they are imagining doing that task in their head. This is quite truly a remarkable finding, because what it means is that you can use mental visualization to prepare yourself for future events by literally rewiring your brain.

In case you are unfamiliar with neurology, I will briefly explain that last phrase. Basically, the more times you do something the stronger the neural pathways related to that experience become in the brain, and the stronger those pathways become, the better you become at something and the more automatically it will occur.

Now think of the implications of this for fear. If you have a strongly entrenched fear in your mind, then you are likely to react very strongly to the thing that you fear because your brain has literally been wired to fear it.

So no matter how hard you try, unless you are able to change those fear connections in your brain you will always react automatically to the thing that you fear, and so will also seemingly have no control over the process.

This is where mental visualization comes in.

Using Visualization

Because visualizing involves closing your eyes and using your imagination, this is something that you need to do in a quiet and relaxed environment. So usually, the best times to visualize will be in the morning when you wake up, or at night just before you go to sleep.

To use mental visualization to overcome fear, we are going to use some simple techniques borrowed from neuro linguistic programming.

First, try to imagine in as much detail the thing that you are fearful of. Involve sound, color, touch, smell and taste wherever appropriate. Your aim is to use as many of your five senses as you can during the visualization process.

If you are doing this correctly, you should then start to notice changes in the way that you feel. For example, you may start to feel distress, tense, nervous, panic or just feel generally uncomfortable.

You are also likely to experience bodily symptoms such as trembling, increased breathing, increased heart rate and restlessness, almost like you were really in that situation and experiencing it in real life.

Decreasing The Fear That You Feel

When you have a clear image in your mind of the thing that you fear, the next step is to try to reduce the emotional impact it is having on you.

This can be done simply by changing the mental representation you have in your mind into something that is less threatening. For example, let’s suppose that you have a fear of public speaking. What could you do to make that situation seem less imposing? Less scary?

One thing that you could do is to try adding some humor to the situation. Perhaps you could imagine giving your speech to a bunch of cows in a field and trying to make them laugh with your jokes?

To make yourself feel stronger and more confident when standing in front of an audience, maybe you could imagine yourself as a giant speaking down to a bunch of people who look like ants?

Whatever it is that you do, try to be as creative as possible no matter how silly your imagined scenario may be. What you will soon discover is that when you are doing this correctly, the negative thoughts and feelings you were previously experiencing have suddenly disappeared.

When that happens, you will know that what you are doing is being effective at helping you to reprogram your mind and therefore, the way in which you respond to fear.

Mind Programming Tips

Visualization is an extremely powerful tool for mind programming, and if used correctly and consistently, can yield excellent results.

However, mental visualization is not something that you do once and then just forget about it. In order to benefit from visualization, you need to be doing it a few times each week for a few months straight. So if you just visualize for one night in your bed and then give up on it, you probably won’t get much benefit.

Another important point to remember is that mental visualization is only a tool that can help you to overcome your fears. In addition to imaging things in your mind, you also need to go out and physically do things in the real world.

The experiences that you have, can then be used at a later date to refine your mental visualization so that you are able to adapt to, and anticipate events or circumstances, which you may not have thought of before.

So if you are looking for a way to overcome a particular fear in your life, try out mental visualization. It does work, has scientific evidence to back it up and is used by many successful athletes, actors and business professionals throughout the world.

So give it a go. It doesn’t cost anything and could bring tremendous benefits into your life.

As a final note, be aware that you are most likely to overcome the fears that you strongly desire to overcome. These will usually be the fears that you feel are limiting your life in some way, and you have a sense of wanting to do anything to get rid of them.

If you strongly desire to do something, you will eventually achieve your aim. But if your desire is weak, you will soon give up and go back to your comfort zone and your old routines.

So when you do your visualization, it can be helpful to think of the reasons why you want to overcome your fear, and then to use those reasons to motivate you and empower the strength of your mental visualization.

Dealing With & Confronting The Fear Of Rejection

If you feel that the fear of rejection is something which is holding you back, a good exercise to help overcome this fear is to think back to a time when you experienced some kind of rejection.

When you think about that rejection, try to think of any lessons which you may have learned from it. Lessons that eventually made you a better and stronger person. You may not have enjoyed that lesson at the time, but you can now see how valuable it was to learn.

What you will usually find, is that when you think back to past rejections that they don’t seem so bad anymore.

Not all rejections for example, were rejecting you or your ideas. Often, they are due to less personal reasons, such a person having a bad day. And even if you were rejected from being who you are, is it realistic for anyone to assume that they will be liked and accepted by everyone they meet?

The key to overcoming rejection is not to take it personally. So rather than letting a rejection negatively affect you for the rest of your life, learn from it and then use it to make you a stronger person that will be capable of achieving more and greater things in the future.

All successful people in life have been rejected many times over, and that is why they became successful. Their rejections provided them with valuable knowledge and life experience, from which they could then use to grow and develop as a person.

This may not be a pleasant experience initially. In fact, it is likely to be a very unpleasant one. But if you can overcome that momentary period of discomfort whenever you are rejected by someone, you will invariably, at some point, experience a much greater period of pleasure as you achieve new and better things in your life.

Learning From Near Death Experiences

For a long time I have been interested in near death experiences (NDEs), and have read and listened to many accounts of people who have “crossed over to the other side” and then came back.

What I find most interesting, is that virtually all people seem to tell the same story no matter what their race or religion is. These people tell of a life review where they experience the life they have lived. In this life review, they experience all the pain and joy which they have caused to others.

Most people who have had NDEs talk about it as being an overall positive experience. Some however, talk about hellish nightmare experiences, and when they come back, they completely change their life for the better.

One thing that has always stuck in my mind when reading about and listening to these NDEs, is what these people tell us about life. They talk about how we choose the body we will enter, and therefore, the life that we will live on Earth. Whatever life we choose, we do so purposefully with the intention of learning something that life will teach us.

Whether or not we do learn from that life, is up to us. But if you don’t learn from that life, you will keep on experiencing a similar life until you do.

Now this may sound like hocus pocus to you, and it may even contradict your current religious beliefs. But what I find believable about these stories, are the thousands of people who have had NDEs and have all recalled similar things.

Learning about NDEs has completely changed the way that I look at life, fear and failure. So rather than running away from fear and failure, I am now thankful when they occur because I know that I will have to get outside my comfort zone in order to conquer them. This means that I will grow and develop as a person.

Of course, I am not saying that I like to experience fear or failure. But what I am saying, is that I am willing to learn from them and not let them hold my life back. And neither should you.

Change The Movie In Your Mind!

Another way to decrease the negative power of the fear that comes with rejection, is to change how those fears are represented in your mind. In most cases, such fears conjure up pictures, sounds or feelings of negative events and consequences.

If this is the case for you, then change the movie in your mind to make it seem less intimidating. Perhaps you can add your favorite music to that movie? Or change the pictures in your mind?

Whatever you can do to reduce the fear associated with the mental images that you have from past rejections, will serve to greatly reduce the debilitating effects that they have on you.

Remember, fear is only as powerful as its representation in your mind. If your representations carry no imagined negative consequences, they will automatically lose their ability to impair your actions.

Again, this is why having an attitude of wanting to learn from every experience can be so powerful. If you are willing to learn from something, then no matter what happens, good or bad, you realize that in the end you still benefit either way. This will greatly reduce your fears, and increase your willingness to go out and try things which you previously feared.

Pattern Interrupt

A third technique which you can use to overcome feelings of rejection, is by using a pattern interrupt behavior.

To do this, the next time that you are feeling anxiety or fear, stop, and then do something completely different. Change the room you are in. Change what you are doing. Or change the people you are around.

By suddenly changing what you are doing, you will often find that you have interrupted your feelings of anxiety and that they have suddenly disappeared. This occurs because it takes a lot of attention to think about fear. If you remove that attention, you instantly remove that fear.

Pattern interrupt can be used with any kind of emotion. So the next time you want to change an emotion, interrupt it!

Just Do It!

By far the best advice that you can follow to overcome the fear of rejection, is to face what you fear head on and just do it. This is the only way that you will overcome your fear of rejection, because given enough rejections, you will soon become desensitized to them and so won’t take them personally.

The first few times that a person is rejected, will likely be the most uncomfortable and painful because everyone wants to be liked and accepted by others and it hurts when we aren’t. But if you persist, you will soon develop a thicker skin and will find future rejections far easier to deal with and much less painful.

The hardest step is the first step, but if you can force yourself to make that step and then keep on moving forward, you will eventually overcome your fear.

Dealing With Fears Of Failure

People who have a fear of failure often have difficulty in pushing themselves forward to achieve their goals. They set out with an expectation of failure, and so many times will never even bother to make an effort to do something.

This can lead to frustration and disappointment, and cause a person to become filled with regret as they look back on their life and wonder what could have been had they not been so paralyzed by their fear.

The effects of a fear of failure are obvious. But I think Steve Jobs summed it up best when he said that people who are afraid to fail usually don’t achieve much in life.

If you are unsure whether or not you have a fear of failure, try answering the following questions to help you find out.

1) Will You Work Harder To Keep From Failing Than You Will To Win?

People who suffer from a fear of failure are often motivated to work hard in order not to fail.

Failure is something that is constantly in the back of their mind, and as a result, the actions they take are done to avoid a failure rather than achieve a success. Typically, this involves “playing it safe”, not taking too many risks and staying inside their comfort zone.

On the other hand, people who do not suffer from a fear of failure, are motivated to work hard in order to win or be the best. Consequently, their actions are much more adventurous and they are willing to take greater risks and get outside their comfort zone.

2) Do You Work Harder To Keep What You Currently Have? Or Work Harder To Get Something Better?

If you work harder to keep something you have, this may be because you have a subconscious fear of failure.

Since you are always concerned about losing what you have, you are therefore motivated to keep what you currently have rather than trying to get something better. Again, this involves staying in your comfort zone and not taking too many risks.

People who work hard to get something better are not afraid of losing what they have. They set out with a mindset that even if they do lose what they have, that eventually they will get something much better.

Living Below Your True Potential

As you can see from the previous two questions, the fear of failure causes people to live mediocre lives that are far below their true potential.

Fear of failure prevents people from ever starting to work towards a goal because they feel that the risk of failing is worse than the victory of success. Often, these people have an attitude of “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it“.

A fear of failure usually comes from your childhood, the stories you hear from other people or movies that you have seen which greatly exaggerate real life consequences. All of these influences can instill a fear into the mind, which then causes you to become much more cautious and reserved than you normally would be.

Typically, this effect is gradual, and develops over several years. However, when a fear of failure does manifest itself, it tends to become a downward spiral, whereby the more fear you give into your fear the more fearful you become.

The extreme of this would involve someone who fears the outside world and does not leave their home. This is known as agoraphobia.

Dealing With Your Fears

A simple technique that you can use to help overcome a fear of failure, is to use something called a progressive collapse technique.

This involves first thinking about all the bad things that could possibly happen from a given situation. You then ask yourself, what would happen after that, and after that, and after that. You continue this process until you find the extreme of the worst thing that could possibly happen.

What you will usually discover, is that the worst thing you thought of wasn’t so bad after all. And most of the time, it won’t even happen anyway.

Another method that you can use, is to try to break the habit of how you normally respond to fear.

When people have a fear of failure it becomes a habit, and consequently, they give into their fear without really thinking about it.

But if you can recognize this habit in yourself, you will then be able to identify those times when you are purposefully avoiding doing something because of a fear that you have associated with it.

If you then confront your fear head on, instead of backing away from it like you normally do, you will eventually change the way that you respond to fearful situations.

Remember, fear can only be overcome by you confronting it. The more times you give into a fear, the stronger it will become and the harder it will be to overcome. Likewise, the more times you stand up to a fear, the weaker it will become and the easier it will be to overcome.

Dealing With Fears Of Success

The opposite to a fear of failure, is a fear of success. This fear is strongly interlinked with your level of self-esteem and self-worth.

How worthy you believe yourself to be of something, will therefore largely determine the amount of success that you experience in life. More so than the skills or education you have. This makes understanding and improving your level of self-esteem absolutely crucial if you ever hope to overcome a fear of success.

Do You Have A Fear Of Success?

An easy way to determine whether or not you have a fear of success, is to ask yourself these questions.

• Have you ever felt that you were close to achieving something big, but then failed at the last moment?
• Have you managed to live a disciplined and productive lifestyle, then suddenly went back to your old bad habits?
• Have you seemed to reach a plateau in your life in terms of success? And no matter how hard you try, you cannot seem to get any higher?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you most likely have a fear of success.

Now, it may seem strange that people should fear being successful, but what you should understand is that this fear arises from a subconsciously instilled belief that was most likely formed during your childhood and teenage years of life.

What this means is that consciously you may desire success, but subconsciously, for whatever reason, you do not feel that you deserve it.

What Causes Limiting Beliefs In The Subconscious?

The majority of our beliefs were formed during our childhood.

The way you were treated, and the things you were told (particularly by your parents), all helped to create and shape certain beliefs in your mind. Some of these beliefs may have empowered you, filling you with confidence. Whilst others may have limited you, filling you with self-doubt.

These subconscious beliefs directly influence the type and level of success that you will achieve in life. If you were made to feel important and special as a child, you are likely to believe that you deserve success and that success is something you will and should achieve.

However, if you were made to feel badly about yourself, the opposite will occur. Instead of feeling worthy, you will feel unworthy. Instead of feeling that you can achieve success, you will feel that you can’t achieve success.

A person who is filled with limiting beliefs also has low levels of self-esteem. The effect of this is that they subconsciously believe they are only capable of achieving a certain level of success.

If they start to achieve more success than they subconsciously believe they should, they will usually resort to self sabotaging behaviors that will bring them down to the level they believe they should be at.

This is also why people seem to reach a certain level of success in their life, and then can’t seem to get any further. Again, their subconscious beliefs are holding them back at a level they feel they should be at.

How High Can You Jump?

A good example to demonstrate this point comes from an experiment done with jumping frogs. Several frogs were each placed in separate glass jars, and then covered with a lid to prevent them from escaping. Food, air and water were provided for them.

At first, the frogs kept jumping trying to escape, but each time they jumped they would hit their head on the lid. After 30 days, the lids were then removed. Despite the fact that the lids were not there anymore, the frogs never jumped out of the jars. Even though they could have easily done so.

During the 30 days which the frogs were kept in the jars, they learned that they could not escape from the jar by jumping. In essence, they formed a belief that the top of the jar was as high as they could go. Even when the lid was removed, this limiting belief kept them where they were.

This simple experiment shows the power of our beliefs systems. We all formed certain beliefs as a result of our childhood, and many of us still hold onto those beliefs even though they are no longer true and are limiting our true potential.

To realize your true potential, you must therefore realize that there is no lid on the jar and that you can jump out. To do this, you must never assume that you can’t do something until you have explored every possible option. To use a cliché, you have to learn to think the impossible.

Loving Failure

Another reason why people may have a fear of success, can be due to the conditioning (learning) which they received as a child.

If for example, a child was given lots of attention and overly comforted by their parents when they failed at something, then eventually they may have learned to associated failure with a pleasant emotion.

So over time, failure, at the subconscious level, became seen as something desirable. Something that made that person feel good. As a result, they began to subconsciously sabotage their actions so that they could subconsciously enjoy another failure.

It is actually quite common for people to reward themselves for failure, but by doing so, they reinforce they emotional pleasure which they associate with failing.

For example, when you fail at something, it is a natural reaction to do something pleasant to take your mind off that failure. You may eat some chocolate. Buy yourself some new clothes. Or maybe even have a drink? All of these things make you feel good, but they also send a message to the subconscious that you are giving yourself a reward for failing.

So is it any wonder that people have a fear of success? If they get pleasure from it, why not fail again? This is why it is vitally important that you never “reward” yourself for poor performance. Only reward yourself for desirable outcomes, because that it the type of behavior which you want to reinforce and continue.