Fear is an Emotion

False Evidence Appearing Real.

Fear is an emotion, and as such, is not a physical thing. Therefore, fear is not real. Rather, it is just an illusion that is created by your mind.

These imagined scenarios of the perceived threat and up feeding your fear to the point where it becomes all-consuming. Here’s the kicker: often these scenarios never happen.

How To Overcome Fear And Realize Your Potential

Overcoming fear may sound easier said than done. When you are in the face of fear, it’s hard to see a way out. The goodness is that because you are the root cause of your fears, that means that you are also the solution to them. However, none of this will be possible if you aren’t ready to face your fears.

Identify Your Fears Through Writing

There are times I have felt afraid but didn’t even know why. If you keep your fears inside, you allow your mind to control how you feel. We all know how that turns out! In order to prevent this confusion from happening in the first place, the first step is to identify what your fears are.

What Makes You Feel Afraid?

Instead of thinking about these things, write them down. When you write down your fears on paper and actually question them, it forces you to analyze why you are afraid. Questions are designed to trigger your fears and bring them to the surface. Is this going to be a comfortable process? Probably not.

Deep inner work never is! However, if you continue to keep your feelings in the dark, the scarier they will be, and the more disempowered you will become.

Have you ever been afraid of something and in the end everything turned out good?

Here’s an example:

I lived with the fear of my mother knowing that I was talking about what she did to me growing up. I was so fearful I kept everything locked up inside me. It wasn’t until I decided to tell the counselors what had happened to me as a child that I began healing. I was expecting them to tell me I was wrong or weak because I couldn’t deal with what happened to me. On the contrary, they were shocked I had gone through what I had and hadn’t been hateful to everyone around me, which sometimes I was, or ended up commenting suicide. After many therapy sessions that I began to realize it wasn’t my fault it was my mothers.

Once you identify the experience that you associate with your fears, you become armed with the power to take action to change them. Eventually, your fears become smaller and smaller, and your strength, bigger and bigger.

Practice Gratitude

From Personal experience, I have learned that you cannot experience fear and gratitude at the same time. They are literally on opposite ends of the f the continuum of the human experience.

When you are experiencing difficult times in life, it’s easy to drop into fear. Everything feels overwhelming. In that energetic space, it can be hard to stay grounded.

Get yourself grounded and you can navigate even the stormiest roads in peace.

Bright drops.

I do a lot of reading, meditating, and praying to stay grounded as I can in this crazy world.

Developing a gratitude practice allows you to not drown in fear. It doesn’t mean that you still don’t feel it, but the blow will be lessened, thereby allowing you to see the brighter side of struggle.

When gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. This is positive psychology. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.

Anyone who experiences fear knows that there is almost always a story attached to whatever it is that you’re fearful of. Regardless of what that story is, the running theme is ”I can’t do something.” Fear loves to hang out with your inner circle and come up with worst-case scenarios about what could happen.

Gratitude helps keep these limiting stories at bay. When you practice gratitude, your brain shifts to what is currently working instead of what isn’t working.

The act of being fearful is a future-oriented process, while gratitude is a present-oriented one. The next time fear tries to creep its way into your head, replace that disempowering thought with a empowering one. It sounds easier said than done, but it works.

Release Control

Are you a control freak? If so your not alone. This is how a lot of people manage their fears, or so they think.

I used to think if I could control everything I wouldn’t be so fearful of what happened. Because knew how things would end. That is not the case.

In actuality, all that happens to people is their masking they’re fears by trying to control everything. If you can relate, it’s time to release control. Trust me when I sag that is a losing battle.

Fear results in controlling behavior and when this behavior does t give us results we’re seeking it further intensifies our fears.

If you attempt to control fear, you actually become a victim of it. This fear and control cycle leaves a .ot of people feeling defeated. The reality is that there will always be things that are beyond your control. That’s just how life works.

The only thing that you have control over is your inner world and how you choose to respond to your external environment. The next time that you catch yourself trying to control everything, step back and ask yourself what are you afraid of.

Start to get serious about what thoughts are he generating your fear. Curiosity and fear cannot co-exist. Once you let go of one, you invite the other in. True freedom comes from fully releasing control. When you are able to do this, you being the process of releasing your fears as well.

Ask yourself if you have any control over the situation at hand, can you change the situation? No, then don’t try it will only stress you and cause more fear. Yes, then do something about the situation push through the fear and make the change.

I love this verse. It explains everything.

What then shall we say in response to these things? If God is for me, who can be against me. The Lord is with me like a fearsome warrior.

Romans 8: 31

Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You

Living in the comfort zone will get you nowhere in life. In my experience, not doing the thing’s that scare you will only increase the likelihood that your fears will grow and inevitably, take over every decision that you make in life.

Is it really better to get out of your comfort zone? The answer is always yes.

I want to encourage you to do one thing every day that scares you. It can be something small. All that matters is that you take action. Make it a habit to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Nobody likes to do this, but if you want to achieve success, you’ve got to be willing to try.

Putting yourself in new and uncomfortable situations triggers a unique part of your brain that releases dopamine, nature’s happy chemical. It’s the only way you can grow stronger and start healing from anything in life.

When you condition yourself to do something every day that scares you, your fear fades away and your courage grows. Think about it…when you face your fears, how can you fear them again? Soon enough, your confidence will skyrocket.

Final Thoughts

The next time that you feel threatened by fear, I encourage you to pull upon one or more of the above strategies. Change your relationship with fear. Instead of letting it knock you down, use it as motivation to grow and achieve more.

Once you realize that fear is not real, the obstacles that appear to stand in your way will be removed, and you will feel empowered to take action.

Fear has two meanings- forget everything and run or face everything and rise. The House is yours. The face of the matter is that there is nothing of nobody standing in your way of greatness.

Your potential in life is limited by only one factor- you. Are you ready to change fear into action?

The Will and Ways of Hope

Talent, skill, ability- whatever you want to call it- will not get you there. Sure, it helps. But a wealth of psychological research over the decades shows loud and clear that it’s the psychological vehicles that get you there. You can have the best engine in the world, but if you can’t be bothered to drive it, you won’t get anywhere.

Conscientiousness, self-efficacy, optimism, passion., inspiration, etc. They are all important. One is particularly undervalued and underappreciated. Thats hope.

Hope often gets a bad rap. For some, it brings up images of a naive man pushing up against a wall with a big smile on his face.

Hope is not a brand new concept. Hope consists of agency and pathways. A person who has hope has the will and determination that goals will be achieved, and a set of different strategies at their disposal to reach their goals. Put simply: hope involves the will to get there, and different ways to get there.

Why is hope important? Life is difficult. There are many obstacles. Have goals is not enough. You have to keep getting closer to those goals, among all tbs inevitable twists and turns of life. Hope allows people to approach problems with a mindset and strategy-set suitable for success, thereby increasing the chances they will actually accomplish their goals.

Hope is not a feel-good emotion, but a dynamic cognitive motivational system. Under the concept of hope, emotions follow conditions, not the other way around. Hope related conditions are important. Hope leads to learning goals, which are conducive to growth and improvement. People with learning goals, which are actively engaged in their learning, constantly planning strategies to meet their goals and positively related to success across a wide swatch of human life from academic achievement to sports to arts and science to business.

Those lacking hope, on the other hand, tend to adopt mastery goals. People with mastery goals choose easy tasks that don’t offer a challenge or opportunity for growth. When they fail, they quit. People with mastery goals act helpless and feel a lack of control over their environment. They don’t believe in their capacity to obtain the kind of future they want. They have no hope.

Whether measured as a trait or a sate, hope is related to positive outcomes. There was a study done on the impact of hope on a college student. With hope related to a higher GPA. High hope students, we’re relatively compared to low hope students we’re also more likely to have Brady and we’re less likely to be dismissed from school due to bad grades.

The link between hope and divergent thinking makes sense, considering divergent thinkers are good at coming up with lots of different ideas and hope involves coming up with a number of different strategies for obtaining a goal.

And your life will be brighter than the noonday; its darkness will be like the morning. And you will feel secure, because there is hope; you will look around and take your rest in security.

Job 11; 17-19

The Difference Between Change And Trasformation

Transformation is the willingness to risk our idea about ourselves for the sake of something we want. No matter when the outcome we can never return to the same place.

The difference between transformation and change is that change can come and go but transformation is permanent. Change is a result of behavior but transformation is about identity. We can change the way we do things and then return to doing them the same way. If we transform ourselves from an inadequate person then everything we do is different. We have become someone we were not but more true.

Transformation can happen to us. A death, a birth, a marriage, a break up can all be transformative if we pay attention. We all experience life but it’s what we do with it that matters.

You possess the greatest gift known to mankind: the power of choice.

Is there something in your life that should be better? You have everything you need, right now, to change it.

You can’t always control external people and events, but there’s a secret: Everything changes when you want to change yourself.

Smart people know that we achieve our best life when we take time to look honestly at who we are and where we are and then make a change.

In other words, we can transform ourselves into someone completely new.

Easier said than done, right?

Ways You Must Implement To Make Sure Your Personal Transformation Is A Successful One

Record the outcome. To get what you want, you must first know exactly what the final outcome will be.

Take baby steps

Learn from others

Be the outcome

Be willing to be uncomfortable

Be your own cheer leader

You possess the greatest gift known to mankind: the power of choice.

Most of the greatest thinkers and doers in history we’re ridiculed and chastised when they created change. When you better yourself, you should expect the same. That’s the proof your on the fight path.

I have learned that you may have to change the people who don’t support you, but this leads to better confidence in yourself. If people don’t support you it only drags you down and makes you less confident in what you want to change. Don’t give up- you can do it.

Stop Sabotaging Yourself

Do you ever find yourself so much you forget your phone charger? Then it turns out that you’ve got an important call and you spend the entire time feeling anxious about you phone dying?

Or perhaps you’ve decided a family member or friend doesn’t listen to you; so you keep talking more anymore trying to hammer home your point. Unfortunately, this leads them to tune out, even more, threatening your bonds. There are just a couple of ways you may be sabotaging yourself and your relationships resting unnecessary pain and self-generated stress.

To stop sabotaging yourself, you must first recognize when you’re getting in your own way. Some of the time, we’re acutely and painfully aware of this- like when we find ourselves procrastinating before taking a literal or physical mess so that it becomes a bigger deal to clean up later. Or we impulsively buy a large bag of potato chips when we’re trying to cut back on junk food.

Of course, other times we’re less aware of our self-sabotage or we misdiagnose the cover problem. This gets in the way of you focusing on someones great qualities and holds you back from potentially becoming good friends.

To stop sabotaging yourself, you need to figure out your patterns of behavior and create ways to counteract them and form new habits.

Knowing Your Typical Thinking Patterns

Our personality and life experiences predispose us to dominate modes of thinking, but these can be biased in ways that are unhelpful in the majority of situations.

For example, people who are prone to anxiety tend to be hyper-vigilant to signs of threats that aren’t really there. This happens to be one of my personal patterns of self-defeating thinking. The way this manifests for me is that problems always seem bigger than they really are, whenever someone asks me to do something I internally overreact and perceive whatever is being asked as more serious than it is. I tend to overthink and stress myself out.

How do I deal with this? Knowing my thinking bias, I factor it into my judgments. I discount my initial reaction and go back and reviewer the requests with fresh eyes. I specifically say to myself, ”My brain is reacting to this as if it’s a threat, he most likely it’s actually an opportunity.”

To moderate your thinking biases, you’ll need to develop a physiologically sophisticated uunderstanding of your own thinking. This is possible with some effort of reflection. Maybe you tend to worry people are angry at you when usually this isn’t the case. Maybe you tend to impose your perfectionist standards on others and it hurts your relationships. Or you tend to hesitate too much in making decisions. When you thoroughly understand your personal thinking errors, you’ll be able to correct for these, and this will become easier and almost automatic with practice.

Prioritize One-time Behaviors That Reduce Your Stress Over Time.

When you reduce your mental clutter, you’ll have more time and cognitive energy for correcting your thinking and behavioral biases.

In today’s world, we tend to get extremely busy chasing things that don’t need chasing after. A very common self-sabotaging habit is thinking well remember to do something but then forgetting. To work around this tendency you can design aspects of your life with the assumption that you are going to be imperfect. I write myself a to-do list every day. And look at it after each task is done and cross it off. There are technology apps for this also. I used to put money someplace in my car so if I forgot my wallet. This backup can still b strategy means that if I forget my wallet doesn’t generate stress. I can still buy those days essentials like gas or whatever groceries I need for dinner that night. I leave pens lying around the house since sometimes I have to write stuff down and don’t want to search the house for a pen. It takes a few minutes to walk around the house when I put them back at the end of the day, but it reduces stress during the day.

Rules For Decision Making

Decision making is hugely draining especially if your anxious or a perfectionist who overthinks every decision. If you reduce cognitive fatigue from decision making, you’ll have more emotional energy for other things.

If You’re going to need something within two weeks order, buy it now or order it now. If I’m going to need it within two weeks I get it now. It’s less stressful to know I have it than worrying all run out.

Perfectionists self-sabatoge themselves by having inflexible standards and be dismissive of incremental gains. They want to solve a problem completely, right now, and aren’t motivated by solutions that improve a problem even if the solution is almost effortless.

Avoidance And Procrastination

When we procrastinate or avoid, our anxiety about what we’re avoiding tends to increase. Many times people who procrastinate don’t think to use a strategy for getting started even thought many exist.

Use project to-do lists to get organized on what needs to be done that day to utilize small scraps of time.

Shrink uimportant takes to a bare minimum required for getting them done. Perfectionist habitually expands the scope of projects to the point that they become unwieldy.

Try last things first. Sometimes the typical final steps in the task is easier to start with than the typical first steps.

Are You Afraid to Hope

Courage is like love; it must have hope to nourish it.

Hopelessness is the ultimate fairer of imagination. The most uninspired form of courage is willing to get out of bed each morning and continue our lives. In the face of that will not inspire us, relationships that have gone stale and weighed with failed expectations, a world that has little resembles that dreams of our youth, most of us choose to go on. What gives us hope that things will change for the better?

We frequently talk about the importance of hope without specifying what it is that we are hoping for. Hope is genuine it must be realistic; otherwise it is but a dream. Visualize the long lines that format at lottery outlets when the payoff reaches hundreds of millions of dollars. The lottery has the motto to got to play to win. A more realistic slogan would be. ”You’ve got to play to lose.” it is obviously hope that pimples people to stand in those lines while discussing how they will spend the money

What’s next? We waste a lot of time thinking about the past, or that version of what it should be. We bring our past into our future. I was at a restaurant the other day and was forced to listen to two men that had discovered that had grown up in the same city. They were caught up reminiscing about acquaintances, their athletic prowess in high school. Woven info the conversation was past hurts. The fact that cell phones had made up all routinely privy to information about the lives of strangers that we could do without, I was especially struck by the sadness implied in these memories when everything seemed possible and football heroes would never be old men practicing a game they could never play well. The problem is that hope is undone by the odds that make it unrealistic and cause many to spend money they cannot afford.

The hope for miracles also provides fertile ground for those who would sell us cancer cures, effortless Weight loss programs, real estate with no money down, natural remedies, untold wealth, or shortcuts to finding the perfect mate. People (other self-help authors) don’t get rich advocating perseverance, loyalty, or years of education. Where’s the fun in that?

We are in love with new ideas, the big score the sudden transformation. We ignore a fundamental truth: Only bad things come quickly. It will happen. Why do you think children hate school? Why is the slow acquisition of knowledge boring? Why do we appear to have such short historic memories? Why does the stock market driven by fear and greed, oscillate so wildly and unpredictably, exactly like ones bankroll in a Las Vegas casino? All these occur because we are distracted from the real purpose of our lives by a dream of effortless success, narrowly defined in our culture as the accumulation of worldly goods.

In the face of the greatest disparity between rich and middle class (not go mention poor) iń our history, we know one of our two major political parties is devoted primarily to the interested to the wealthiest citizens. The core concept of capitalism, that we can all prosper together, has given way to societal selfishness that is a. Invitation to class conflict based on envy and a sense of unfairness.

What is lost in such fragile hopes is the concept of pride in our work, the satisfaction that comes with doing our jobs well in the knowledge that we can construct a comfortable, if not extravagant, life as a result of our labors. Stalked by recession, unemployment, home foreclosures, staggering income, jobs overseas, and endless welfare it is easy to become angry and cynical.

When this anger is redirected minorities, gay people a d government workers- we are in danger of becoming fragmented along the lines of race and class, become prisoners of our fear, and that there is not enough to go around and that we must act on our own economic interest. This is the formula for relinquishing the center of society, an interdependence that we are all in this together and that we will succeed or fail based on our ability to hear heartbeats other than our own. This idea is where our best hope reside.

We need to let go of the instant gratification mentality the degree to which we covet the latest electronic gadget bodies ill for this effort. The thoughts being shared on a $500 iPhone are more compelling than those we used to write down and put in the mailbox.

Have you read anything significant on Twitter lately? How many Facebook friends do you have? How many of them could hon count on for help at 3 AM.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick

Proverbs 13; 12

For everything written in the past was writo teach us, so that through the endurance and encouragement they provide we might have hope.