One of the biggest barriers to change – perhaps THE biggest barrier – is fear. Fear that we’ll discover we’ve made a mistake. Fear that we’ll fail. Fear that others will judge us for our choices.
We may KNOW, in our heart of hearts, that we are ready for change. We may feel it in our bones. We may have an inkling – or even a clear view – of what we want to create in our lives instead. And yet, that pesky fear keeps showing up, holding us hostage to our current circumstances.
This may surprise you, but fear is a healthy emotion. Karla McLaren, in her book The Language of Emotions, reminds us that the purpose of fear is to keep us safe. Fear moves us into action, i.e. when we instinctively step out of harm’s way on a busy street crossing or navigate fast-moving traffic on a busy highway. When it’s flowing freely, it brings us focus and allows us to access our instinct and intuition, helping us move safely and confidently through change.
So why does fear, which is meant to help us, end up paralysing us instead?
- Our brains are not great at discerning ‘danger signals’. In the days of hunter-gatherers, our brain was wired to perceive threats to our physical safety, like a sabre-toothed tiger ready to pounce or a risk of being exiled from the tribe. Today, research involving MRI scans shows that non-physical threats such as threats to status, certainty, autonomy, relationships, and fairness activate the same fear center of our brain as threats to our physical safety, sending us into our automatic fight-or-flight response, even if we are physically safe.
- We don’t engage it properly when we experience it. Most people, when they experience fear, either (a) try to push past it (trying to overpower it) or (b) totally succumb to it (letting it overpower us). Neither is a healthy response.
When fear makes itself known, it is trying to give us the energy and focus we need to deal with change. This means we need to slow down and listen, rather than push it away.
Work with your fear, not against it
When we are able to create space for our fear, we access valuable information that can help us make wiser decisions for the future.
To do that, I typically invite my clients into a four step process:
- Ground yourself
- Ask questions
- Test assumptions
- De-risk your next steps
Ground yourself
When you are feeling fearful, your body is essentially in fight-or-flight, with adrenaline and cortisol pumping through your veins. This is great if you are in physical danger and need the resources to get to safety; it’s less helpful if you are actually objectively safe but your psyche thinks otherwise.
How do you recognize if you are in fight-or-flight? It’s important to know the symptoms. Personally, I become hyper-focused on one thing, to the point where there is no room in my brain for anything else. I lose all feeling in my body, and I become obsessed with whatever I perceive as the threat (and the best way to react to it). For example, I felt I did a terrible job facilitating a workshop I led recently. My fear kicked in, telling me nobody would ever want to work with me again, and I better find a new career. Sure my life was over, I began actively thinking about what other career options I had, and who I would need to reach out to.
To come out of fight-or-flight, it’s important to find ways to ground yourself and manage your energy. Sometimes it can be as simple as putting your feet on the ground and taking three deep breaths. Other times, we need more of a break, taking time to go for a walk in nature, rest, or watch something silly that makes us laugh (Trevor Noah Netflix specials are a favourite of mine). A regular practice of yoga, qi gong, or meditation, or more active forms of meditation such as running, cycling, or swimming, can be helpful go-tos in times of fear.
Ask questions
Once you are not ‘hijacked’ by fear anymore, it can be helpful to metaphorically sit down with it and have a conversation. Sometimes I invite my clients to visualize this fear in their mind’s eye – can they give it a form? For one person, it was an overactive bunny; for another, it was a knight in armor who tried to knock him out at the knees. It’s fascinating to see what shape our fear takes if we look at it head on.
The purpose of giving form to your fear is to create some distance so that you can have a conversation with it. You might even imagine sitting down for a cup of tea (or its drink of preference – ask it!). Whatever you do, it can be helpful to ask your fear these questions and record the answers in writing:
- What do you want me to know?
- What action would you have me take?
- What are you afraid will happen if I don’t take that action? (And then what?)
My client whose fear showed up as an overactive bunny discovered it was afraid he did not have the skills to succeed in the career path he dreamed of, and we worked together to identify his transferable strengths. My client with the knee-bashing knight learned that the knight was afraid his ambitions would carry him too far from his family home, losing contact with his relatives, which prompted him to make a more active effort to visit and connect with them. In my example of the workshop-gone-wrong, my fear became helpful in exploring re-design options for the next time we run it.
Remember – your fear is not cowardice – it is caution. And while it may overreact at times, there is always wisdom to be found in what it has to say.
Test assumptions
While sometimes, your fear will have very sensible suggestions, at other times, its imagination can run a little wild. For example, if you’re thinking of quitting your job, it’s sensible to make sure you have some amount of money saved or another safety net to catch you if you fall (i.e. a partner with a steady job). It’s probably not true, however, that if you quit your job, you’ll end up alone and homeless with nobody to call. This kind of extreme thinking is leftover from our ancestral fear of being exiled from the tribe.
When you notice your fear catastrophizing, it’s time to interrogate those thoughts more rigorously. Byron Katie’s process called The Work works well for this. Essentially, you write down your fears and then ‘interrogate’ them using the following questions:
- Is it true?
- Can you absolutely know it’s true?
- How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
- Who would you be without that thought?
- What is a more empowering thought or belief?
These questions do a beautiful job of creating some space from the fear, again allowing us to think more clearly.
De-risk your next steps
The bigger the change we are contemplating, the scarier it feels. Most changes are not irreversible, but the bigger it is, the more effort it takes to roll back. For example, a friend of mine was convinced she wanted to move from Dubai to London. She gave up her flat, shipped all her belongings, and found a new job. Six months into the move, she decided she actually didn’t want to be in London, and moved back to her old life. Not irreversible, but it was expensive in every sense of the word.
If we listen to our fears, they can become our partners in de-risking the moves we want to make. Think of it like bumper bowling – you don’t have to commit to the perfect trajectory from the start. You can make smaller moves, learn from what happens and adjust.
I often encourage my clients to think of their desired change as a hypothesis rather than an absolute. You want to move to a new country: test it for a month before committing (e.g. renting an AirBnB and working remotely). You think you want to become an entrepreneur and open a children’s nursery in your neighbourhood: try volunteering at one for a week, or interviewing several nursery owners to learn more about what it involves.
Whatever your ultimate goal, if you reframe it as a hypothesis you are testing, your fear can help you come up with some sensible interim steps to test whether it’s actually the right path.
Somewhat counterintuitively, the only way to move through the paralysis of fear is to give it some space. The more we can learn to slow down and listen to our fear, rather than trying to push it away or let it overpower us, the more we can work with it to chart a course through change that is both courageous and sensible. And the more we listen to its counsel, while at the same time questioning some of its more extreme concerns, the more it learns to trust us in the driver’s seat of our lives.
