Fear Not
Right now I'm reading, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. In the book he asks,
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
His words have led me to hang a question mark on what fear has traditionally meant in our lives, and what it could mean if we learned to reframe its influence to work for us, instead of against us. Always a sucker for inspiration, I gathered a dozen quotes from Pressfield's various writings that put a new spin on an old hangup. 1. The hardest thing in the world is to be ourselves. Who are we? Our family tells us, society tells us, laws and customs tell us. But what do we say? How do we get to that place of self-knowledge and conviction where we are able to state without doubt, fear or anger, “This is who I am, this is what I believe, this is how I intend to live my life”? 2. Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. 3. You may think that you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true. Fear saps passion. When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion. 4. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now. 5. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance. 6. Better to be in the arena getting stomped by the bulls, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot. 7. Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself, "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death. 8. The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist. 9. Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day. 10. We feed resistance with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer resistance. 11. The opposite of fear is love - love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off. 12. When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. In the comments tell us how you use fear to your advantage in your life and business.