Here Is How to Recognise and Overcome Your True Fears

Image by Shazib Nadeem from Pixabay

As I have approached this new year, I’ve received an abundance of guidance around the introspective process of contemplating and stocktaking my life. While I’ve had some deep and insightful conversations with my friends and with myself when meditating and journaling, the most helpful exercise has been in recognising what my true fears are around success.

With those exposed, it is then easier for me to address whatever is holding me back.

I was reminded of this simple concept when reading There Is No Such Thing as a Fear of Success and this straightforward exercise was offered to help uncover the real issues:

“Close your eyes and imagine achieving what you want. Let yourself play it out. See how that achievement changes or doesn’t change each different sector of your life and your relationship with each different person, thing and place in your life. See what your mind tells you is the reality of what will happen as a result of achieving what you want. Then answer the question: If I achieve what I want, what bad thing would it mean or what bad thing would happen?”

I knew straight away that the things I want the most in my career and personal life also bring with them a fear of losing me again.

As a child I felt that my needs, wants and desires were not a priority, there were always others to consider. Most often I was concerned about maintaining peace, and thus was concerned about how others would react to whatever was happening in the environment or what I was doing, I usually tread carefully and tried to manage all of that. When I really wanted something that was not a given, I knew I had to fight hard for it, I also knew I was disturbing that peace.
My nervous system was therefore generally in a chronic state of anxiety and – when I really wanted something – I would go into fight mode to go after it. Day-to-day I’d be acutely aware of and actively managing the emotional environment around me, which was exhausting, and felt the only way to get my needs met was to leverage the inner energy that came with the build up of anger at those needs being ignored most of the time.

This became a way of being in the world as I grew. When I first struck out on my own as an adult, it was to move in with my partner at the time. Inevitably there were compromises and – although the number of people in the household was less – there was now another person and extended family whose needs and expectations formed part of the picture.

No more than in parenthood did my propensity to manage the emotional environment around me become stretched to the limit. I thought I’d have had breaks and respite from parenting, but those only occurred when I was out working in my career. It wasn’t a low responsibility type of deal, quite the opposite. Eventually I became burnt out.

Other than a few periods in my life where I’ve had the opportunity to take a number of months out from the merry go round, I haven’t had my fill of me-time and certainly haven’t had enough of it on a consistent basis. I never mastered the art of having me and having others.

While I have experienced all that taken to extremes in recent years, I also finally recognised the dysfunctional patterning in it all, and started to learn about healthy boundaries, about healthy ways of communicating my needs, wants and desires, and the many and various ways to regulate my nervous system and recognise when anxiety and old wiring are in the driving seat.

I’m free of the obligations that came with a prolonged, unhealthy, (less than) romantic relationship, but I do still have obligations to my children, to making a livelihood and I feel an obligation not to lock myself away from commitment and connection to others. Quite the opposite, I’d like to be a living example to my kids of healthy relationships and commitments in action.

Still. I have no template for having me and having that.

Intellectually I trust that I’ve done the work, I’ve started to reap the benefits in many areas of my life, but I have no template of that trust within my body. The old associations between romantic relationships, career and loss of me time are still hard wired in my nervous system. There’s no way through this other than conscious, active management moment to moment, to create new, healthier, neural pathways over time.

The first step to achieving this is recognising those old associations then, as Teal says in her article, “once you have that answer, the real work is about addressing that fear or that unwanted thing directly because that is the real problem, not the getting of what you do want”.

I’ve started that work more actively now, firstly with this free guided meditation on calming my fears that you can download.

But as you head into this new year, when you consider the deepest yearnings on your wish list, can you start by identifying what is it that is really getting in the way of your achieving those things? Once you have identified the obstacles, then your real work can begin.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You, How to Fulfil Your Long Desired Yearning for Belonging , There is Nothing to Fear, Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, Autonomy – Break Free of Money Fears and Be Fearless - Let No One Cast Shadow on Your Light. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.