Chapter 12

Moving Beyond the Fear That’s Zapping Your Faith

In This Chapter

arrow Getting the facts about fear and figuring out how to face it

arrow Finding the faith to deal with your fears

arrow Coordinating your thoughts, words, and actions

You may as well face it: Putting yourself out there can be scary. Just the thought of responding to your heart’s tug to live your dreams can create anxiety and questions, whose unknown answers are enough to stop you dead in your tracks. Will I fail? Am I wasting my time? Will people like me? Am I ready?

You can’t know the answers to these questions until you take a step into the unknown. Are you willing to do that? If you’re not ready yet, don’t fret. That’s what this chapter is about — facing your fears and growing your faith.

In this chapter, you figure out how to stop dreadful worrying and take a leap of faith into possibility. You discover that you have more faith than you ever imagined and that it’ll support you moving forward. You see that winning is within your grasp.

Using Fear to Help You Grow

There’s only one way to grow from fear: You have to step into it. Attempting to avoid fear is like trying to walk through the rain without getting wet. It’s impossible.

Do you recall the first time you were fearful? Was it the first day of school? Or your first speaking engagement? Did it creep up on you during your first date? Fear is a frightening thought that you chase away by consciously acting on what’s intimidating you.

Even though you’ve confronted the monstrous emotion before and proven its powerlessness, fear can still cause you to hesitate to act on something you desire because it makes you feel unsure of yourself. It can also come in the form of a message or an intuitive feeling that you shouldn’t act on something.

In this section, we focus on this frightening thought that paralyzes you from moving your life’s agenda forward. First, we help you to understand fear and where it comes from. Then, we show you how to use fear to your benefit.

exercise.eps Respond to the following questions to get better acquainted with how you deal with fear:

  • When was the first time you felt fear?
  • How did you deal with it?
  • What did you learn from stepping into fear? Or not stepping into fear?
  • What would you like to do today that you’re not doing because of fear?
  • What’s stopping you from stepping into it?

Understanding fear and where it comes from

You’ve likely heard that fear is an illusion, a deceptive tactic of an internal enemy trying to stop you from accomplishing your purpose. We don’t want to insult you by telling you that what you believe isn’t true, because whatever you believe is true for you.

Because fear appears at different times in your life and for different reasons, we want to help you develop the tools to identify where it comes from so you can gain an understanding of how to best deal with it.

You don’t overcome fear by targeting fear. You feel fear because of what you believe will happen. Fear is a manifested emotion that consistently reappears to challenge you to overcome your internal issues, embrace yourself more fully, and move you closer to your life purpose. At times, you’ll have to learn a quick strategy to outwit it until you have the time to go within and identify the core of what’s making you feel fearful. In the meantime, through consciousness and practice, you can develop your own best tactics to use fear to your advantage.

This bombshell may puzzle you, but don’t let it. It’s simple; fear is the result of a deeper concern. It seems like fear is the problem because it’s what bubbles to the top. Therefore, it’s blamed for many false starts, abrupt stops, and unending delays.

It’s accused of destroying dreams, ruining well-practiced presentations, and terminating relationships. For example, suppose you fear public speaking. At the root of your fear is being accepted by the audience or fear of making a mistake. At the root of both of these concerns is confidence. Why aren’t you confident? This book is being written to help you uncover the answer to that question.

Many concerns can drive fear — insecurities, past bad experiences, lack of information, undiscovered personal power, and imposed teachings. Many emotions can be found at the core of fear. But beneath every emotion that stops you from taking action is mistrust. You don’t trust yourself.

Mistrust exists for many reasons, such as past letdowns, decisions that seem valueless, lack of experience, deception, and mistreatment from others. Also, you may never have been exposed to the importance of growing self-trust. These are just a few examples; you have your own reasons for not trusting yourself.

The bottom line is this: Fear wins when you feel incapable of creating a safe place to feel good about yourself after an attempt to live your desires, regardless of the outcome. It doesn’t matter whether the attempt involves a love relationship, business idea, job promotion, or telling a friend you don’t like how you’re being treated. Fear is a self-inflicted wound that takes control of your life when you can’t reassure yourself that — regardless of what’s on the other side — you’re going to be okay.

Uncovering your core fears

The key to the mystery is the answers to questions that perhaps you have yet to ask:

  • What do you fear?
  • Why do you fear it?
  • Do you trust yourself? Why or why not?
  • What do you think you’re incapable of doing or becoming?
  • Do you want something to happen but fear the outcome? What is it?
  • What’s at the core of your fear? For example, is it past experience, lack of information, rejection, or uncertainty?
  • Will you be okay if the outcome is different from what you expect? How can you reassure yourself of that?

exercise.eps Here’s an exercise to help you face and move beyond your fears. You have a barometer that measures your truth. The truth is often funneled through your fears and emotional insecurities. Examine the following sample. Notice that the person wants to apply for a promotion at his job, but gives fear-based reasons for why he won’t get the promotion. Beneath the fear are lies that he tells himself to justify his position. The result is self-stagnation.

table

After careful review, consider your own accusations. Complete the exercise and use this table as a tool to start facing and moving beyond your fears.

Developing a friendship with your fears

Developing friendship with friends, coworkers, neighbors, or pets requires establishing rapport. You have to take the time to compassionately and patiently understand who they are and what’s important to them. Developing a friendship with your fears involves the same attention.

Remember, fear is an outcome. The goal is to establish a relationship with yourself and your deep emotional wounds that create the fear. The purpose of becoming friends is to learn how to compassionately love all of who you are. By doing so, your weaknesses become your strengths because you know what they are, and you learn how to flow with them and, when necessary, navigate around them.

It’s nice to be able to say, “You can heal from every experience.” That doesn’t mean it won’t leave any evidence of having been there. If a cut is severe, although it heals, a scar remains. The scar doesn’t hurt. You can touch, hit, and press it. It responds like any other part of the body. The scar isn’t a symbol of pain, but a sign of love. It says, “You can do it. You can make it through anything.”

Knowing your strength beyond what you see

You’ve done it before — over and over again. You’ve made it through the most difficult moments of your life. It’s easy to forget how strong you are when you don’t pause and take inventory of what you’ve been through. Evidence shows that you’re amazingly powerful and strong.

tip.eps We know at times you look in the mirror and see a vulnerable, confused individual you barely know. As you stare into your own eyes, you wonder: Where am I going? What am I doing? What am I going to do? These are key questions to ask yourself. They indicate that you’re aware that you’re again at a pivotal point in your life and that your life needs your attention.

Do people give you compliments that are difficult for you to own? Do they say things such as, “You’re so talented” or “I admire you for how much you’ve accomplished against the odds”?

Seeing what others see in you is difficult. Your internal strength may have pulled you through the pain of a devastating divorce, an unexpected diagnosis, or an unforeseen death. Your personal power may have carried you through the loss of your job, betrayal from a friend, or gossip that nearly destroyed your career. Maybe you lived in a household where you were suffocated versus celebrated, and others often wonder how you made it.

Reflecting on your past can inspire you. The realization that you’ve made it through the rain and storms of life reflects back to you your inborn tenacity and fortitude.

exercise.eps Try this exercise for inspiration. Stop reading, close your eyes, and reflect on your life. Go back as far as you can remember. Think about what happened, how it made you feel, and what you did to overtake the situation. If you still have anger or any other negative emotion, take time to forgive.

remember.eps Forgiveness comes easier when you realize that the person did the best she could at the time based on her experiences.

To help you organize your thoughts, divide your experiences into time frames based on age. Start with ages 0–5 and think about your experiences in five-year increments, for example, 0–5, 6–10, 11–15, and so on. If you haven’t faced many major challenges, increase the increment to ten years.

Think about each incident and how you overcame it. For instance, say between ages 6–10 you were physically abused. You suppressed your pain until age 25. During ages 13–24, you self-medicated by abusing drugs and your body. At age 25, you forgave the perpetrator and took control of your life. At age 33, you have a healthy marriage and relationship with your children.

This is a huge accomplishment — a true display of courage, compassion, and faith. You’re powerful far beyond what you imagined.

Creating the Faith to Face Your Fears

We’ve established that you don’t overcome your fears — you eradicate them by uncovering your core issues that are creating your fears. Your prime artillery is faith. Whatever you do takes faith. Faith is the belief that an unseen thought, feeling, idea, dream, or desire will manifest itself into visible reality. That’s powerful.

To think that you have the ability to take a thought — something you can’t see, hear, or touch — and turn it into something that you can see, hear, and touch declares that you’re the most powerful creation on earth. Isn’t it astounding to realize that you’ve done this your entire life? It’s nearly overwhelming to know that you have that much power in your possession.

Consider this example: Before you landed the job you have, it was a thought, an idea. You acted on your thought, and Bam! — your thought became a reality. Who you think you are and everything that you have began as a thought. Your faith in yourself moved you to action. But you have bigger dreams, don’t you? These dreams are so incredible that you secretly hold them within yourself, wondering whether you can achieve them.

Are you unaware of what you possess? Are you unaware that you have something incredibly enormous within you? Or are you oblivious about the degree to which you have it?

Are you saying to yourself, “Yeah, right. How do I tap into and use my ‘supernatural power’?” We aren’t talking about a cartoon character that kisses a ring or spins around three times to gain greater strength. This is authentic, natural power that you’ve always had and have always used. Perhaps you just didn’t know it.

Fear has had the upper hand and won many battles in the past because you were uninformed. But the war isn’t over. Now is your chance to turn the tables. Follow these steps to consciously tap into and use your power to create your dreams by exercising your faith:

  1. Ask for what you want.

    Sometimes the hardest part of the process is deciding what you really want. Get clear on exactly what you want and ask for it. Who are you asking? God, the universe, yourself — whatever you believe in.

  2. Believe that what you ask for will happen.

    Your beliefs guide your decisions daily. If your behaviors don’t line up with what you believe, then you don’t believe it. Move in the direction of what you believe and you’ll see opportunities along the way that will take you step by step to where you want to go.

  3. Watch it unfold.

    Although you believe it, you’ll still be surprised when your victory shows up. The reason: There’ll be times when you’ll feel it’ll never come or you’ll think you’re off track. If you were leaving New York and heading to California, you wouldn’t turn around because you ran into a traffic accident. You’d wait until the road was clear and then keep driving. Don’t lose faith when obstacles come.

exercise.eps This exercise is designed to help you replace thoughts of fear with words of faith. Statistics show that 90 percent of what you worry about will never happen. Your thoughts become your beliefs, and your beliefs enter into your heart and eventually come out of your mouth. If you change how you think, you’ll change what you speak, which means you’ll hear something different. What you hear will create a change in what you see and do.

Here are the steps to make it happen:

  1. Police your thoughts.

    Think of your mind as a busy highway, with your thoughts being the constant flow of traffic. You have to monitor your thoughts by stopping them and finding out where they’re coming from and where they’re going.

  2. Make a decision if your thoughts are too dangerous to be on the highway.

    Is your mental traffic going in the same direction as your physical body? If your thoughts are causing you to take dead ends, get you involved with people and situations that lead you nowhere, or cause you to have accidents, they’re too dangerous to be in your mind. Tell them to get off the highway. You can use quips, quotes, or scriptures to make negative thoughts disappear instantly.

  3. Your body, mind, and words must be in alignment.

    Once you establish a vision for your life, your thoughts and words must line up to produce your desired results. As you practice Steps 1 and 2, you begin to see your body turning in the direction of your vision and your feet taking steps toward it.

Realizing the value of increasing your faith

What is faith worth to you? Everything. The life you desire depends on your faith in creating it. Without sureness in what you believe is possible, you’re doomed. Therefore, knowing what it takes to sustain and increase your faith is critical.

Take a look at the nearby sidebar, “Faking you out.” You can apply the wrestling tactics mentioned there and the ones that follow to your arsenal when you have to wrestle fear and other opponents in your life.

  • Respect your opponent. When wrestling, you have to respect your opponent. You never know what he’s thinking or what new moves he’ll make next. Never assume you’re not in for a real fight.
  • Have razor-sharp focus. During a wrestling match, each participant has successes. If one opponent celebrates too soon, taking his eyes off the prize of winning, his opponent can exploit this and create more obstacles and frustration. Enjoy small successes, but stay focused on the target.
  • Use a flexible strategy. Wrestling requires a flexible strategy. You can go into the match expecting to use one technique, but because of the opponent’s move, it may not work. Knowing yourself and your capabilities helps you to make the necessary adjustments.
  • Prepare to have undying endurance. Once the match begins, it doesn’t end until someone is pinned to the mat or says, “I give up.” This takes a mindset of relentless persistence and commitment. Don’t forget, if you get tired, you can pause for the moment; just don’t give up.
  • Plan for superior discipline. Wrestlers have to stay within a certain weight range to wrestle in their class. If they go up in weight, they’re forced to wrestle a heavier opponent. Self-development and the success that comes from it take discipline. Make a commitment and stick to it.

For every match you win, you’ll increase your faith in yourself and your capability. Because of what you learn about yourself, the next face-off will be less challenging. The challenge is only as difficult as your lack of confidence to conquer it.

Increasing your self-esteem by increasing your faith

Faith is what produces the result. Whether you believe in yourself or something greater than yourself, or you just believe, the principle works for whomever chooses to use it. When you create the intended results, your self-esteem increases. Interestingly, when your self-esteem increases, your faith increases. Faith and self-esteem are traveling buddies.

You can assert that you have faith, but your behavior has to back it up. And your life will confirm that fact. If you’re struggling, here are a few pointers to help you:

  • How strong is your faith? Hoping and believing are often used synonymously. We don’t advise this. Hoping has doubt. Believing has possibility. Knowing is claiming completion even before something is completed. You sit in one of the three categories in the various areas of your life. Identifying where you are helps you to see where you need to increase your faith and confidence.

    exercise.eps Use the following matrix as a sample. Notice Lisa’s strengths and weaknesses. Create your own matrix like this one to gauge where you are and what areas need your attention.

    table
  • What’s nagging you? Is something calling you? A new job, relationship, or business? Is there a reason you’re not responding? What is it?
  • Do you believe you have what you need? Taking on a new challenge is difficult when you don’t know whether you have what you need. If you’re questioning yourself, respond to the questions in the earlier section “Uncovering your core fears,” if you haven’t already.

tip.eps If you continue to lack faith, consider trying the following:

  • Read the scriptures, an autobiography, or another inspirational work.
  • Watch an inspirational movie.
  • Join a positive support group that focuses on self- or spiritual development.
  • Volunteer for an inspiring organization.
  • Write your life story and be inspired by the times that you doubted yourself but moved forward anyway.

Dealing with big challenges

Sometimes life delivers to your doorstep challenges that appear too complex for your mind to process and too problematic for you to decode their meaning. The range of these moments can be as complicated as trying to understand the passing of a child, the abandonment of a 50-year marriage, or the slaying of a family member.

As you look within your own world and the world around you, tragedy strikes — falling planes, school massacres, and death by war. These are big challenges without apparent answers. Humbled by their magnitude of destruction and internal terror, it’s in these moments that even experts are brought to silence.

We can only extend to you our encouragement to stand in the strength of your faith, in the belief that truth will deliver justice, and in the power of knowing that love always wins.

Getting Your Mind, Mouth, and Motions in Alignment

Every thought you think, every word you speak, and every step you take plant the seeds that blossom into your reality. Throughout this chapter you are presented with the tools to form the thoughts, words, and behaviors that will shake your fears and give you the confidence to walk in faith.

Inconsistency in your thoughts, words, and behaviors creates instability and keeps you off balance and out of alignment with the truth. When you choose this path, you create your own suffering.

With proper arrangement of your thoughts, words, and actions, you can survive disappointment, use the power you possess, and overcome life’s challenges by outmaneuvering your fears. When you choose this path, you zap your fears and walk in faith.