Feel the fear and reap the rewards
I recently did some very big things that scared me.
Ironically, they all came at the same time, but sometimes that’s just how it is. It also makes the rewards at the end all the sweeter.
So, I want to share with you these scary things that I did, to show you that you too can do things that scare you and come out, not only unscathed on the other end, but proud of yourself and with a stronger heart.
And speaking of hearts, do you remember the lion from The Wizard of Oz? He has a terrible time with his fear. It’s obvious in the way that he shakes, trembles and runs away.
Yet, fear isn’t always so obvious. Sometimes, fear can make us turn our backs and run off in the opposite direction. It can also make us freeze, paralysing us with indecision and uncertainty. We can literally become frozen in fear, emotionally and physically unable to shift out of it.
Unlike the lion, I didn’t realise I was living in fear. It was so sneaky and inconspicuous that I didn’t even realise it was lurking under the surface until I dove in and broke through. It’s only recently that I realised how much it had been driving my life, without me having a clue it was there.
Unpicking the tangle of my fear
2020 had a really big impact on us all, and I feel that many of us may still be suffering the consequences of the extreme stress and fear that pervaded our lives as we knew them.
Stress is often defined in a two-dimensional way, so our understanding of it can be quite limited, but it’s actually much more complex than we realise. Our stress response in the body is triggered in a reaction to an attack, but it’s also triggered by a perception of it.
Our subconscious, the internal hard drive of information about everything we’ve ever experienced, stores the memory of every stressful event, situation and encounter. It remembers every single thing, so when it perceives a threat, it sets the trigger off, sending us tail spinning into a stress state without us even realising.
As many of my readers will know, I had a very different understanding of the events that unfolded in 2020, and they scarred me, much more deeply than I realised, causing me to fall into a place of deep distrust at the system that had been keeping us all so disempowered and disconnected.
I can now see that I had triggers pinging away throughout the past few years, on an almost constant basis, and they buried me in a layer of stress and fear that has stopped me from truly living.
Fear keeps us living small lives
In the clear light of a new year, I can finally understand how deeply stressful those years were for me, as they were for all of us, and how they kept me small and limited as I shied away from the world and all that I feared in it.
Fear keeps us in a place of disempowerment and helplessness rather than choice and empowerment. It keeps us paralysed and frozen rather than making decisive and inspired action. So, while I carried on living after the events of 2020, I was scared to take any risks, I was scared of other people’s judgement of my opinions, and I struggled to adapt to a world that I no longer recognised or really wanted to be a part of.
I’ve written about all of this before, how I didn’t feel I fitted in, but I was never aware of the impact of this fear, until I broke through it and came out of the other side.
It all happened before Christmas when I whispered a word.
For the past several months I had been exploring themes around failure and rejection, navigating how to pull myself out of a low place where I was residing. On the journey I had been listening to the gentle words of Eckhart Tolle. As he explained his story, he mentioned that before everything changed, he said a word.
That word was ‘accelerate’.
This word felt so new and exciting to me. I felt ready to come out of the darkness and it was like a long invitation to bloom upwards, like the lotus flower that climb up and out of the mud.
Breaking free of fear
Did life accelerate? Yes, it certainly did. I gave in my notice on my therapy room, with no idea of where I was going to live, and found a lovely flat in Cambridge that I am slowly making into a home.
Moving, like any major life change, is always fraught with fear, anxiety and overwhelm. We toss and turn at night, filled with ‘what if’s’, fearing that we’ve made the wrong decision, stressing about finances or worrying that it won’t work out. It’s amazing how our minds deceive us into this place, freezing us in uncertainty rather than inspiring us with excitement.
Moving my home, my business and my life to a new place filled me with so much fear, but now I’m here I’m wondering what took me so long. Without even realising, I moved to the buzziest neighbourhood, to a flat that is surrounded by trees, in a place that is now starting, even in a few short days, to feel like home.
The move was a risk, but it’s paying off because I’m not allowing the fear to drown out the excitement.
When we stay in a vibration of fear, anxiety and stress, we shut ourselves off from receiving help, feeling gratitude and experiencing joy, all the things that lift our spirit and make life flow easily and effortlessly.
It’s when we open our eyes to the potential and possibility of everything working out for us that we land in a place of hope. Hope is one of the most powerful and potent vibrations that can create miracles and move mountains.
If you can shift, with conscious effort, from a place of fear to hope, everything changes.
Feeling the fear and reaping the rewards
Another big thing I did that scared me was to run four self-awareness workshops as part of a retreat in Portugal. I hadn’t been abroad in a long time, I had never run a workshop before, I had only a week to prepare the workshops, and I hadn’t mingled with a group of people for a long time. I was terrified but I said yes.
It turned out to be an amazing experience that pushed me so far out of my comfort zone that I could no longer see it, and something that rewarded me in so many wonderful ways.
I met wonderful people, I stayed in a beautiful resort in a magical part of Portugal, I learned that I could lead workshops and that I actually really enjoyed leading them, and I have two more retreats booked in, one in Morocco in October and again in Portugal in January.
The retreat opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me. And as someone who had been living quietly and safely over the past few years, this was the ultimate breaker of fear, crashing me through the barrier and allowing me to surface with a completely different perspective of myself and my capabilities.
Landing in a place of faith and trust
On the retreat in Portugal one of the workshops I led was on fear, exploring what it really means and how we can shift past it and return to a place of faith and trust.
The main thing to remember, when faced with something that scares you, is that you can handle it, whatever comes your way. Fear is merely a lack of trust in ourselves and our ability to handle whatever may arise. It is the packaging that wraps around our self-doubt. Your self-esteem rises considerably as soon as you move past a fear, leading you to realise that if you can do that, you can do anything.
What a wonderful reward for your courage.
We also need to have faith in order to defeat fear. Faith is trust in the evidence of things not yet seen, which can be challenging. But, when you take yourself to that place where you can trust there’s a net underneath you, ready to catch you even though you can’t see it, the world smiles upon you and rewards you for the risks you take on its behalf.
So, be brave, have courage and reap the rewards.
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