The Psychology of Fear

My Own Fears

They say that ‘Of all the liars in the world, the worst are our own fears.’  While ‘worry’, as the next of kin of ‘fear” is the most destructive habit, ‘fear” is the greatest problem to overcome. Why? Because it is the same fear, the same crippling fear that feeds in itself that would make one  afraid to confront and overcome it.

I have fears of my own that I would like to tell you about. Do you have fears too?

Now let me tell you about my own fear.

Facilitating Anxiety

I am basically the nervous type of guy. But I would call it Facilitating Anxiety.  When there is something I need to do or when I have a responsibility to fulfill that would bring me out of my comfort zone, I tend to get anxious about it. As a result, I prepare ahead of time to manage the anxiety. I do not want to prolong the agony as it can sap my physical and emotional energy. To obviate that, I complete the task much ahead of time, and there goes the worry.

Debilitating Anxiety or Neurotic Fear

There is another type of Fear, which is Neurotic Fear. Some of its most concrete manifestations would relate to the person’s ‘fear of failing’.  A person who has been accustomed to succeeding can be a good candidate for this. It is the perfectionist orientation and self-serving pride that would make a person too focused on preserving his/her immaculate record and not staining his or her reputation with a single failure. This can be true of people whose self-worth is too dependent on what they achieve.

           

I also have this debilitating anxiety to some extent. But don’t get me wrong. It is not that I do not try. I would take the challenge more often than not, but my fear of failing, my fear of not doing it perfectly salvages my effort and chance to give my best shot and produce the best outcome I am capable of producing. Subsequently, I do  not try and risk as much as I believe I should. Somehow, I am not a good psychologist to myself. I need to remind myself of this precious lesson from the movie “The Running”, which suggests that ‘the object of the race is not winning the race but finishing it’. I need to constantly remind myself that it is not about ‘winning all the time’ that matters in  life.

Fear of failure

Who among of you are not afraid to fail? Who among of you never failed? Because failure is a dismal reality in life (well depending on how we see it anyway), fear of failure becomes commonplace. Human as we are, we may have  failed so many times that we would not remember all of them. We fell the first time we tried to walk, right? We nearly drowned the first time we tried to swim, didn’t we? How many of you play baseball or softball? Did we hit the ball the first time we swung a bat? Speaking of baseball, they say that the heavy hitters, the ones who hit the most home runs, also strike out a lot.

Failure as an Opportunity to Shine

There are many exemplary Men & Women who turned the “fear of failure” into “courage in the midst of failure”. I would like to mention some of them here.

o                                Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times, but also hit 714 home runs.

• Eighteen publishers turned down Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston  Seagull  before Macmillan finally published it in 1970 and by 1975 it had sold more than 7 million copies in the US alone.
• Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.
• It took more than 100 times for Thomas Alva Edison to come up with a perfect bulb.
• Abraham Lincoln lost eight elections, twice failed in business, and suffered a nervous breakdown before he became one of the greatest presidents of America.

What made these men prevail? It is their perspective that is positive

Hence, every time I am faced with a challenge that  I feel like turning my back from, I would recall in my mind the words of wisdom from some great people to give me courage.

·         Obstacles are those frightful things we see when we take our eyes of our goal. -  Henry Ford

·         I did not fail 100 plus times but I discovered 100+ ways of not making the perfect bulb. -  Edison

·         The path was worn and slippery. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other out of the way, but I recovered and said to myself, “It’s a slip not a fall.”-  Abe Lincoln

Hence, the next time I take the challenge before me and it did not turn out as I expected it to be, I just have to remind myself that “It was a slip, not a fall.” And next time you guys find yourself in the same predicament,  you just have to say to yourself “It is a slip, not a fall”. And next time I am tempted to turn my back from opportunities because of ‘fear to fail’,  I have to remind myself that my fear is blinding my eyes to see the reality, and that I have to confront it head on, because “Of all the liars in the world, the worst are our own fears.”