Ep12 Fear Keeps Us Small

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of How can Fear keep us small?

Fear has been around since, basically the mammalian part of the brain came into being and it is something that ultimately keeps us away from danger. So when there is danger being sensed the amygdala fires up and fear comes into protective mode to get you the being to safety. Now I have heard it said that fear is an illusion and a case can certainly be made for that however, how are we supposed to grow as human beings when fear keeps us stuck in a tiny space and we are never able to expand our own horizons and never develop and become creative.

Fear keeps us small and at some point we are going to have to make a leap of faith and jump into the future so that we can expand and live fulfilled lives. Thinking is one of our most powerful tools. We set goals and then we go through the steps to achieve them. So in order not have fear come in and block us we have to focus, we have to intentionalize, we have to strategize all the time so that we can recalibrate in order to achieve our goal.

So lets look at 3 points of contention around fear.

The first point is the fear of not being loved. This is around us and it consumes us. We like to be loved. It is one of the basic human needs where we want to experience love and belonging. In order to get around this anxiety you have to become okay with yourself and that’s not really that simple however it’s the task at hand. So how do you become okay with yourself. The answer is you have to become okay with your imperfections. They are what they are so be okay with that. Secondly, start to look at what your actual strengths are so that you can build on those. The concept of weaknesses shouldn’t even come into play at this point.

The second contention is not being good enough. This one haunts a lot of people. It creates as an antidote all by itself, if it is not thought through, perfectionism. Anyone who is like this, you know very well this eventually fails. You can never be totally perfect all the time. So again, you have to be okay with where you are in your journey.

Let’s review. The first was the fear of not being loved. The next one is the fear of not being good enough.

The third one is the fear of not belonging. The fear of belonging is a human need. We are social animals. We like to be around other people. We like to be validated by other people, which of course implies that we should validate them. We like to be supported. We like to feel loved. The difference between I want to be loved and I want to belong is that I want to be loved for who I am. I want to belong is a need to socialize. So one is more about other people loving you while belonging is you belonging to the group.

These three are the major contentions around fear. These are the basic fears that we build layers upon. The older we get the more dysfunction around this we have. You need to be able to get to the core issues at hand in order to address that fear.

We are going to kaizen this fear based business right out of here. So remember, kaizen is about small incremental steps. If you find that the first step is too big and it kind of makes you go eek then make that first step smaller. Take your time it’s about continuous improvement. Small steps and whatever the time is that it takes.

First of all you instinctively and intuitively know when you really need to be afraid of something. So that pops out and that’s ok. That’s not what we are talking about. So that’s time to act. You have to get out of the way of danger. However if you want to try some steps of how to overcome the fears that are not really dangerous but you perceive them as so then this is where you want to try the Be-Do-Have model.

In terms of kaizen, what’ so important about small steps? They don’t invoke fear and more importantly they allow for...