Living with some physiological anxiety is inevitable. Anxiety is the brain’s ongoing surveillance to protect you from threats. You should be afraid to touch a hot stove or confront a mugger or jump off a cliff.
Living with daily fears, on the other hand, is not inevitable if you implement the right principles. Here are seven ways you can dramatically reduce or eliminate the fear in your life.
1. Give your all.
Holding back your best effort will increase your level of fear because it creates greater risk of poor results. If I you are prone to laziness while starting a new business, then your fear of failure will be high and rightly so. By not giving it your all, you are jeopardizing the project. If you know that you are giving 110%, you will have much greater confidence.
Do you give your all? If not, you have an opportunity to greatly reduce your fear.
2. Be the same person on the inside.
This one boils down to social honesty. If you go along with the crowd or misrepresent yourself for social approval, you create an unavoidable fear of being found out.
If you say yes when you should say no, you create a false perception that you are easy going. Now, you’ve set an expectation that you don’t feel like living to. If you pretend you are more intelligent or capable or accomplished than you are, you now have something to hide.
3. Accept your limitations.
This one is tricky, especially in today’s world where personal development gurus tend to preach that anyone can do anything they set their mind to. If you think you should be capable of accomplishing something of which you are not capable, then your anxiety will be tremendous.
The greatest college basketball coach of all time, John Wooden, once told me that he understood each of his players had differing levels of talent and different limitations. He expected them to do the very best of which they were capable and that is all. Trying to perform in an area where you are less capable seems to be a waste of your talents.
4. Chunk.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Trying to eat the whole thing at once creates overwhelm and anxiety, as it should. Step-by-step approaches are known for greater productivity. They also reduce fear. In NLP we call it chunking, believing that things are best accomplished one chunk at a time.
5. Balance your roles.
An imbalanced life creates fear because neglected areas become unmanageable. If you spend most of your time working and neglecting your family, your family will soon reward you with some high stress problems. If you devote all of your time to your children and neglect your marriage, you are inviting distance between you and your partner and fear of all the possible ramifications.
6. Know who you are not.
Deep down, are you trying to be someone else? Do you have a mentor or hero of some kind that you wish you could be? This is pretty common. People start following a guru or mentor and wish, consciously or unconsciously, that they were living that person’s life.
Wishing you were some else puts you out of touch with your own values and capabilities. Essentially, you are setting yourself up for failure in a big way.
7. Know your higher power.
I am convinced that positive connection to something greater reduces fear in a significant way. Why? Because we all know at some level how powerless we are in the grand scheme. We know we are mortal. We know we are weak compared to the forces of nature.
Connection to a higher power aligns you with the universe, as long as the connection is felt. Intellectualizing doesn’t work here, as God and the Universe are scarcely comprehensible in spite of ever-advancing technology.
For help implementing these methods, claim your free strategy session with Mike Bundrant by filling out the form below. Someone will be in contact soon.
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