2020 has left many people paralyzed with anxiety and fear. It has taught that no matter how successful you consider yourself to be in life, fear and anxiety can get you at any moment.
Financial fear, fear of uncertainty, fear of losing, fear of change, fear of failure, fear of rejection, and many more. One has to deal with almost all of them in life.
Excessive amounts of fear and anxiety can really ruin a lot of your life’s important moments, like an exam, interview, date, or a business meeting.
That is why learning how to overcome fear and live an anxiety-free life is one of the most important life skills that everyone needs, especially in current times.
To teach you this crucial life skill, we’re here with Jack Canfield, the best-selling author of sixty-six books, whose new book The Success Principles Workbook has just come out.
Today, Jack will walk us through the 6 steps that you can take in order to understand fear, overcome fear and turn it into success.
How to Overcome Fear (6 Ways)
Fear is something that almost anyone has felt recently. We’re dealing with a pandemic, people are still recovering from last year’s job loss, and some are still stuck under lockdowns. Basically, things are still to become stable again.
In such times when fear and anxiety have become a part of life, how can one overcome his fears, move forward and actually be productive? Let’s discuss the 6 ways how to overcome fear and move forward in life.
Fear is Self Created
Fear is something that shows up a lot whenever there is anything threatening in the environment like a pandemic or a widespread job loss or downturn in the economy.
The thing about fear that you have to realize is that fear is self-created. What that means is, even if there is a snake in your room, crawling toward you, you’d have to go into the future and imagine it bitting you or your family in order to feel afraid.
The reality is that in the present moment, nothing bad has happened to you yet. You’re just watching a snake crawl across the floor.
Basically, when you’re living in the present dealing with what you have now, you’d realize that things are fine. You’re sitting in your home, you are healthy, your loved ones are healthy, you’ve got food on your plate, and things are fine.
The thing that is keeping you in fear and worry all night is something that doesn’t exist. It is just your mind’s imagination of a catastrophic event that might come true sometime in the future.
So the idea here is to come back into the present moment to cope up with your fear. This is where meditation and mindfulness come in really handy.
Whenever you’re in fear, take a moment to stop, and think what is it that is making me afraid. What are the thoughts going on in my mind that is making me scared? Once you know what these thoughts are, you’ve got a bunch of options to deal with them.
Change it Into Positive Thought
So one of the options you have once you’ve identified the negative thoughts that are making you scared is to replace them with positive thoughts.
Jack remembers the story of when the 2008 economic meltdown happened, and he was giving a talk in New Hampshire to real estate people. Everybody in the room was down 40-50% except this one guy who was actually up.
When he was asked how he is doing so really well when the whole industry is tanking, and what thoughts he is having that are different than everybody else in the room?
He replied that everybody else in the room is in fear that people are no longer buying real estate, they’ll lose business, they’ll have to lay people off, etc., while my self-talk is- I always do well no matter what’s going on in the economy.
Basically, his self-talk was different. His self-talk was not fear inducing but something that was positive and in the present moment.
This positive self-talk helped him overcome the fear that everybody else was having and allowed him to spend more on advertising when everyone else was cutting their budgets.
The idea here is that because he didn’t get scared and stayed in the present moment by replacing his negative thoughts with some positive ones, he was able to get through one of the hardest times in history.
EFT Tapping
Another technique is called EFT Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique. Many people might be familiar with this technique where we tap on nine different acupressure points to relieve fear, anxiety, pain, stress, and other emotional disorders.
It is basically a stress-relieving technique where you sequentially tap on nine different parts of your body thinking about the situation or stress that you’re going through and ask your body and mind to relax and release all of the negative emotions that it is holding on to.
To learn more about how to use the EFT technique exactly, you can refer to this video here by Jack Canfield himself.
With this technique, you can literally get rid of any fear or phobia within just 3 to 5 minutes. The challenge is, when you’re afraid, you tend to forget the things you know can help you fight with the fear. So keep a reminder with you for this technique.
There’s a thing in meditation we know that when you breathe in and out through your heart, meaning imagining inhaling air into your heart instead of lungs and exhaling as if the air is coming out of your heart.
After that, when you imagine someone you love, like your child or your wife, and sends them love and appreciation. That state of appreciation can really help you overcome any fear.
Basically, anything that raises your vibration and brings you into the feeling of gratitude and love will take you out of fear.
Also Read: 5 Money Habits That Keep You Poor
Imagine the Positive Outcome
If fear is imagining the negative outcome, then joy and happiness would be imagining the positive outcome in the future.
So instead of, “Oh, I’m gonna lose my job and gonna be broke,” think, “I’m finally getting rid of the job I was not happy in, and now I can find creative ways to make even more money.”
A lot of people worry about the markets going down but guess what, it always comes back up. And even when it crashes, it gives you an opportunity of a lifetime to invest.
Similarly, not only markets but any catastrophic event in our lives, we comes back up too. Anyone who is above 80 years of age has seen three recessions, two wars, 9/11 and a lot more. Still, they are among us happily living their lives.
You also have survived everything that has ever happened to you. The thing you have to realize in any situation of fear and anxiety is, just like everything, you’ll survive this too.
If you have the belief that you can survive anything that can happen to you, then there’s nothing left to be afraid of.
Lead a Healthy Lifestyle
Along with everything else, it is absolutely essential to lead a healthy lifestyle to avoid any physical or mental disorder. Remember, a healthy mind lives in a healthy body.
Eat well, avoid having lots of sugar, exercise, practice yoga, do meditation, sleep well, maintain your body shape, and have enough of protein, vitamins, calcium and other nutrients essential to your body.
Avoid smoking, limit alcohol, stay away from junk food, avoid unhealthy saturated fats and trans fats, avoid sitting for long hours, try to limit screen time, etc.
All these are some ways to lead a healthy life and reduce the amount of fear, anxiety, and stress we face in our daily lives. Even if you follow these basic things, you won’t ever feel the need to search up things like how to overcome fear or anxiety again.
Fear is Not a Terrible Thing
It is an important thing to cover before wrapping up the topic, and that is, fear is not a terrible thing. In fact, it is essential for your and our survival as a species.
If you’re walking down the street, and you hear someone walking behind you on a late night in New York City, then fear is what will help you.
Fear heightens your awareness in such situations and helps your body to get into the protection mode, which gives you the ability to run faster, fight faster and protect yourself.
Fear only creates a problem when it is caused by our own thoughts, which leads to constant stress going on in our minds that actually weakens our immune system. So, the most important thing is to be mindful of your mind.
