How to Manage Your Fear and Choose Empowerment

When we think of things we are afraid of, or things we avoid, or things that make us feel inferior, what really matters here is perspective. Sure, sometimes there are objective things to take into consideration, such as qualifications and experience. If you’ve never flown a plane before and you just sat down to try – that might be a little scary and you should definitely be qualified. But for those everyday instances, talking to a friend that you’ve just gotten in a fight with, interacting with someone who’s let you down, speaking up for yourself when you’re being mistreated or taking a risk that might have undecided consequences -ask yourself, why are you afraid?

Don’t brush this question off, it may appear obvious on the surface, but I ask you again – why are you afraid?

Take a Look at Your Fear

There is always something on the other side of what you’re afraid of. When we come up with worst case scenarios in our minds, oftentimes we just stop there like it’s the end of the world. It’s not the end of the world. One way that I like to handle these feelings of fear when they come up for me, is to ask myself “what happens after that?”. Maybe you made a mistake at work, a big mistake, and you might be afraid of being reprimanded or maybe having a stain on your professional reputation. Before we get into the full anxiety and fear of the future that would likely be present here, I want you to focus on the initial fear itself. 

Sure, in instances where there is a lot on the line it’s natural to initially feel fear and anxiety and worry for the future. These feelings are actually important and are meant to help keep us alive. If they show up for you, acknowledge them and don’t fight them, what I’m asking you to do is add a little curiosity to them. Yes, this thing is scary – but what if you weren’t afraid? What if you just weren’t? What if you felt something different, instead?

What is already happening, is happening whether you feel scared, neutral, uncertain, happy, interested – what if you stepped back from the emotions that automatically came up for you and chose something else, either to replace it or go with it, like you were at a buffet of emotions. You have a situation on your plate, and what would you prefer to pair it with, to make your experience easier for you?

Separate Yourself from Your Emotions

As a visual learner, I like to separate myself from my emotions by giving them a physical shape in my mind. Remember that our emotions are trying to help us, namely, help keep us alive. They mean well, even though they can wreak havoc on your mental health if you don’t know how to manage them. Because they mean well, and they have always been with us, I like to refer to them as old friends. Understanding that your fear is trying to help you, and thinking of it as an old friend decreases resistance to that fear and makes it a bit easier to detach from. 

I picture my emotions as little fuzzy characters of different colors with two googly eyes. They’re cute, if I may say so. I visualize them in this fashion to allow for an easy, loving way to view my emotions and see myself as separate from them.

When you identify emotions that come up for you, let’s call them shame and fear – visualize them. Look at them, and then see them as physically separate from yourself. You may want to try seeing yourself as sitting at a table and your emotion is sitting in the seat opposite from you. Personally, I always notice my fuzzy, googly eyed emotions as clinging to my body when I first feel them, and then I lovingly invite them to “sit next to me”. In my mind’s eye, I’m sitting on a small sofa, and I see them jump down and sit next to me. 

When you’re feeling shame, guilt, anxiety, fear, uncertainty – you can look down and see them sitting next to you and know that they are separate from yourself. It helps you to remember that you are not those emotions, those emotions are not in control of you and they are just with you, for now. 

It’s important to know that your feelings are not going anywhere and they are always available to you – so having the right perspective is key. It’s not about making these feelings go away, it’s not about ignoring them, it’s really not even about acting on them either. It’s about acknowledging them and sitting with them. When you think of them as old friends who actually have your best interest in mind, it’s easier to coexist with them and more importantly, see them as separate from who you are as a person.  

You Have a Choice

Now that we have a healthier perspective of our emotions, I’ll bring the conversation back to our initial evaluation of fear, specifically. By separating yourself from your emotion of fear, you also create space for yourself to think and be present. It’s in this space that you can now make a choice. You can choose to allow your fear to run wild, allow it to continue clinging to you, or you can choose to see yourself as separate from your fear and choose your corresponding thoughts. 

You now have space to reason through objective details, you can regulate your blood pressure and take a few deep breaths, you can be still and listen to what your now contained fear is trying to tell you. You can tune into yourself and just be in that moment, grounded and open to learning. 

Once we’ve introduced the concept of having a choice in our emotions, you may be wondering, how do we make the most of this option?

What do you want to do with your fear? That may sound like a silly question at first, but I would like to invite you to embrace your fear. Maybe initially, we want our fear to quiet down and go away. At first glance, none of us want to see our fear. But what if we could use our fear to our advantage? What if you even got comfortable with the feeling of fear? And most importantly, what can we learn from it? This is where the combination of perspective and choice matter because once you see your fear as separate from yourself, and you see it for what it is, you can choose what you do with it. 

Fear is based on uncertainty, so what if you use that same uncertainty on your fear? Let me explain, fear thrives when you don’t know the outcome and it plays with your imagination to make your uncertainty more elaborate than it might need to be. What if you leaned into that uncertainty and asked even more questions? What if you gave your fear more circumstances to be unsure of? 

This is one method you can use for your fear; to overload it with more uncertainty. By leaning in like this, what you’re doing is detaching once more, from one possible outcome, because you’re showing yourself that lots of things are possible. Have you considered that there might be additional information that you don’t know?

Use your fear to fuel you. Channel the energy you get from your fear into creating something productive for yourself. Maybe we go back to our initial example of making a mistake at work: if you made a mistake – own it. Be bold. Create a new marketing campaign dedicated to all the things you learned from your mistake. Walk around as a better person for the things that you now know from a so-called ‘failure’. 

What if you approached your mistake from a place of giving yourself grace? You know that you are a human and humans make mistakes, and you still hold just as much value as before the mistake was made. What if you forgave yourself for your mistake and looked to see how you can use that life lesson to propel yourself forward?

Empowerment is an Option

When you choose to embrace your fear, instead of running from it, the result is very empowering. Now, you can further make the choice to remember your strengths and your abilities. You can choose to remember that you are strong and resilient and you’ve been through tough situations in the past – you can do it again. 

Do this enough times and you’ll see that you’ve built a belief in yourself. You can identify your fear, you can sit with it, embrace it, and live with it – knowing that it doesn’t have to be that scary after all.