Conquering Fear

Conquering Fear

What really keeps you from living your dreams? What problem is most dominant in peoples lives?

The answer is: FEAR!

People live every day in fear. Fear of losing their wealth, fear of losing their loved ones, fear of making the wrong decisions, fear of being themselves, fear of growing up, fear of making a commitment. The list goes on and on.

The leading cause of people not fulfilling their dreams is NOT the fear of failure – it’s the fear of success! The fear of actually accomplishing what they set out to do. The fear of living life to the fullest may have paralyzed you.

This will cause you to never really try in your business, or if you do try, to sabotage your efforts so you never have to face your fear of success.

Most people live their lives in the grip of this fear and they aren’t even aware that it has control over them! The fear is the one thing that can turn your dreams of financial freedom,

loving relationships, and a fulfilling and significant life into a pattern of habits including procrastination, self-sabotage and other bad habits.

Fear is the dominate problem in your life today. The two questions you need to answer to conquer your fear are:

Which fear has the most control over your behavior? Is it the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of success, or is it all of them?

How do I interrupt the bad habits that I have developed as a means of protection from this fear? How do I interrupt the programming I have within me?

These are the two most significant questions when it comes to overcoming your fears. If you can answer these two questions, your life will forever change!

The reality of fear is that it is human and is a part of life. It’s not going to go away. Some fear is even healthy! It is a gift given to you to keep you safe and bring you closer to your creator.

Every person is born with three instinctive fears. These are: fear of falling, fear of loud noises, and fear of abandonment.

These three fears were given to you to help you monitor what is going on around you. Think about it; it is fear that gives you the adrenaline rush that makes you escape from a situation that is really, truly unsafe. It also gives you the same rush that causes you to fight to win.

Faith is born in fear. God knew in His infinite wisdom that fear is what would drive His people back to Him. Although sometimes it is only in times of extreme fear that we look to God and choose Him.

Take a look at your own life and think about the times you looked to God for His power and wisdom. Those were probably times of extreme fear. True faith is born from fear!

So what caused the gift of fear to be the number one problem in society today? Why do people let fear control their actions, beliefs and lives? The answer is the difference between reacting to fear and acting in fear. It has everything to do with your belief system.

Children typically react instinctively to fear, which is appropriate behavior at this age. Most adults don’t make the distinction between reacting to fear, as when they were a child, and acting with their intellect when dealing with fear.

People react instinctively to fear by either denying it or running away from it. They miss the power that comes from acting with their intellect, never allowing the fear to become the gift it was intended to be.

Learn to act with your intellect by exposing your true fears and the beliefs they represent and free yourself so you can move on with all you are meant to do, have and become!

Working on Your Fears

As children, my brother, two sisters and myself we were not allowed to bring anything in the house that even resembled a snake.

I remember once being at Geauga Lake, an amusement park near the Cleveland Ohio area and I had won a stuffed pink snake playing Ring Toss.

This was a class trip and I knew I couldn’t bring it home so I gave the snake to one of my friends. Snakes in any shape or form was not allowed in our house.

About six years ago I was dating a guy, whose brother had a six-foot long yellow and white snake, which I didn’t know about at the time.

When we went to visit the brother, the snake was brought out for my boyfriend at the time to see. The sight of the snake sent me into an absolute panic.

I ran screaming and crying into the bathroom and once I got the door slammed and locked, I wet my pants, right in the bathroom. Talking about being embarrassed not only did I have to clean the bathroom floor but also I had to ride home in wet clothes on a cold January day.

With wet pants and an attitude, I broke up with this man on this day. I felt both of them were satanic or something, normal people don’t own snakes!
My mother to this day is terrified of snakes.

She can’t even watch a snake on television without screaming. Having grown up seeing my mothers fear of snakes made me develop a fear of them also.

I was once told that God put the fear of snakes into women and any woman who is not afraid of snakes is unnatural. Because I was told this I felt my fear of snakes was acceptable.

Being the researcher that I am I had to find out if this was true. In Genesis 3:15 in the Living Bible it states
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

This passage is what God said to the serpent after He found out that Adam and Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge.

When I looked up the word “enmity” it means hatred that exist between enemies. So women were given a “hatred” of snakes not a fear of snakes.

We are supposed to conquer our enemies, not fear them. Just imagine if the United States were afraid of Iraq, we would have a bunch of people running from each other and that would be absolutely silly.

God even told us that we will “crush their heads”. Nowhere does it state that we are to fear snakes. The only fear we should have is fear in God. Once I realized this I watched the movie “Anaconda” for the first time and without fear.

My fear of snakes is a metaphor of my life, I sometimes let things that I have worked hard to obtain go to please others and I also cause my own problems because of beliefs that were instilled in me as a child from others. I have also noticed that my fears of money and intimacy are based on beliefs that were instilled in me as a child.

I feel that if I can be in the same room with a snake without wetting my pants this will be another step forward for me. I am now looking into how I can make this happen for myself. Now, touching a snake is still something I have to work on. Like I tell everyone start with baby steps.

Today I challenge you to identify the fears in your life and determine how this fear has held you back in other life endeavors. Once you have identified the fear I challenge you to eliminate this fear.

If The Fear Fits…..Don’t Wear It!

Undoubtedly one of the most challenging tasks we can face everyday is fighting the fear of failure. At one time or another every single person has had to face the fear of stepping out into an unfamiliar area and leaving his comfort zone and entering the twilight zone.

In Over Your Head?
Probably one of the biggest reasons we hesitate to step out of our boat and walk on the water is the thought, “what if I sink?” Well, what if you do? What is the worse thing that will happen to you? Have you considered it?
If you haven’t, then you’re not ready to take the plunge.

That may sound overly simplistic, but here is something you need to take to heart! “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” In other words, examine the details in the devil.

The more you know the more the fear of failure will diminish. You will never have all the answers beforehand so just forget that. If you had all the answers, you would probably never fail. Michael Jordan said, “I have failed over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed!”

Sounds like a contradiction doesn’t it? You mean failure brings success? Yes! But, guess what? Success doesn’t continue uninterrupted. Sooner or later the cycle turns and you experience another failure.

Round And Round She Goes!
Why is that? Cause I said so! Nah.. I lied; I just wanted to see if you were listening. It happens because everything in this universe goes in cycles. Life cycles to death, sowing cycles to reaping, failure cycles to success.
You may remember the story of Babe Ruth.

During his career he was the home run king of baseball. He hit over 700 home runs. He had another statistic that was not much publicized. He was also the strike out king.
Yea, he struck out over 1400 times in his career.

On one instance, a reporter was interviewing Babe Ruth and suggested that he slow up on his swing because he had fallen in the dirt several times during a game that day. Babe told the reporter to pity the poor pitchers and not him.

Consider this: The most successful people in life are the ones who have failed the most often. The thing that distinguishes them from others is they are not afraid to risk it all. Remember this: “it’s one thing to talk about bull fighting; it’s another thing to get in the ring with that bull!”

Just Between You And Me And The Fence Post!
A number of years ago I used to trade the futures markets. Now granted, it was certainly not as physically dangerous as bull fighting. But the excitement would send your adrenalin through the roof.

To see some of the emotions that I and others would experience you would think that we did have 6,000 pounds of Black Angus beef charging to do a tap dance on our heads.

Early in the morning we would discuss our strategy for the day and we were all in agreement that if “such and such” happened, we would take appropriate action. Well, when “such and such” did happen, we found ourselves reasoning with ourselves and allowed the fear of failure to jack our emotions up and down like a toilet seat at a mixed party.

When the time was right to pull the trigger, and “get in the ring with that bull,” you could hear a pin drop. We saw the perfect conditions,

we saw our indicators tell us what to do, but, we sat there as if we were saying, “I don’t really think that fat meat is greasy!” Yeah, right! Get in that trade Boy!

Made My Hair Stand On End!
Why did we act like that? We had planned, we had studied, we had analyzed those chart patterns until it got our knickers in a twist. And, we knew just how much risk we were willing to take, but still sat there as nervous as a pregnant possum!
And, you know what happened? Yep, you guessed it, our trade got away and we missed out on a great profit.

Why? Fear of failure!
Then there were other times when the trade went the wrong way, so we would sit there and pat ourselves on back for being so “wise” and not letting that trade sucker punch us. Yeah, right, real wise!

My point is: fear of failure can paralyze the best laid plans of mice and men. The fear of getting into those trades was causing our failure. Fear was causing the failure, not inexperience, not lack of preparation, but fear.

Not Until Pigs Fly!
How was it doing it? There is one thing you must never do with fear! Reason with it! Fear will always drag you down.

It will always make you go backwards. Reasoning with fear will always take you away from your dream.
When you are reasoning with fear you are simply second guessing your decisions.

Have you done your planning? Have you done your preparation? Have you assessed the possible outcomes? Then take the plunge and don’t give reasoning a chance to immobilize you.

Getting into a habit of reasoning with fear will cause you to begin compromising what you expect and want from your goal. You will tell yourself, “Maybe I’m expecting too much.”

“Maybe I should settle for less.”
When you begin reasoning like that, you will find it very easy to start settling for something less. Then, you will even begin reasoning that maybe you don’t deserve what you got. Compromise like that a few times and you will begin losing what you got; not to mention what you want.

Taken To The Cleaners!
If you have some fear that is holding you back then realize this: Think of your mind as a container. In your mind there must always be a substance in there that motivates you. It can be fear or faith.

Don’t allow yourself to become double minded. When you become double minded you’re attempting to operate in faith and fear at the same time.

I.E. second guessing your decisions. One minute you’re confident, the next minute you couldn’t punch your way out of a wet paper bag.

Believe me, I’ve been there, done that, and won the T-shirt. If you want to rid yourself of fear, you must replace it with something else or it will come back. Faith is what you want to replace it with.

Your Mission In Life!
You cannot have an empty container. There will always be a force trying to fill that container with something. Don’t let it be fear. Fear can’t stay in your mind if you pull the trigger by avoiding reasoning with fear.
Richard Vegas ©

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!
This article may be reprinted with the following attachment:

conquering fear quotes,conquering fear meaning,conquering fear book,conquering fear folktale,conquering fear ethiopian folktale,conquering fear essay,conquering fear of heights,conquering fear bible verses,