Don't Be Afraid of Fear

Mara here:

It's a pretty common saying that kids have no fear. And it's true. Kids don't know they should be afraid of things. We aren't born being afraid.

It's learned.

It's a survival mechanism.

We learn to fear pain because pain feels bad and usually means our bodies are in danger.

We learn to fear things that damage us in some way.

But often we allow the feeling of fear to become our dominant reaction. And for many of us, at some point in our lives, our fears determine our actions more than our desires do. Instead of doing things because we want to, we don't do things because we're afraid to.

For a long time I was stuck in a rut because everything felt overwhelming. I was depressed and my anxiety was telling me nothing was possible. My fears were overwhelming every other emotion I had. My fear of the unknown, my fear of failure, my fear of everything kept me from doing anything.

I knew this was happening while it was happening, but I felt unable to do anything about it.

Then one day I woke up and just decided I was going to do something. I did it without thinking about it. I had some sort of spark of ambition still left inside me that took over. It was almost as if I got possessed because, if I'd actually taken the time to carefully think about what I was doing, I would have stopped immediately.

I decided I was going to become a professional photographer and I was going to start asking people if I could take their headshots.

And I did it.

And people said yes.

And then people started paying me to do it!!

For months, I had to push all my fears and all my doubts to the back of my mind. I had to keep myself so busy that I didn't have time to let the fear settle in. If I made sure I had photo shoots every day (sometimes free, sometimes paid) so that I couldn't wonder if I should be doing them. I would just have to do them.

There were moments, usually late at night, when those negative feelings would well up, and I would wonder, "Am I doing the wrong thing? Am I making a fool of myself?"

But the next morning I got up and took the photos. I told myself to do it even if it felt scary. I did it even when I worried every moment of the shoot. I reached out to new clients. I just kept moving forward, even though part of my brain was telling me, "Your next shoot could be the one that shows everyone what a fool you are. What if the next shoot is a failure?"

And looking back, I realize I was afraid of being scared. The idea of feeling insecure felt so uncomfortable that it almost kept me from doing something that I enjoy. Worrying that I would feel afraid was worse than actually experiencing what I was afraid of because, the few times I did feel any concern during a shoot, I dealt with it. And, like most photographers, there have been some shoots that didn't go well, but I learned from them. My life wasn't ruined. I just learned from my mistakes.

But the most important lesson is that had I never pushed aside my fear of feeling afraid, I would never have started my photography business. Don't get me wrong, my business isn't a booming success. It's still small. I'm still figuring out what I'm going to do with it. But it is a business. It's something I created out of nothing. I have worked hard and put myself out there. But most importantly, I faced my fear of failure. I faced my fear of the unknown.

I acknowledged I might fail. And I did it anyway.

There have been times in my life I couldn't have done this. And I'm sure there will be times in the future when I am unable to push past the fear.

But hopefully I can slowly make fear a smaller part of my existence. I know I'll never be a person who can face down everything. I have limits. But every time I'm able to achieve something that I once thought was impossible, it makes me feel stronger. and my fear of being afraid becomes slightly less powerful. And my faith in myself becomes slightly more powerful.

And that feels pretty good.

I asked my mom a few questions about this:

This blog idea was inspired by something you said to me. You'd committed to doing a video interview and said that you thought you were afraid to do it because it would be too hard on your health, but then you realized that what you were afraid of was not actually doing the interview but the physical aftermath of it (the "payback"). Do you have any suggestions for how people can more carefully identify what their true "fears" are?

My suggestion when you're struggling with fear is to get out a piece of paper and write down what you're afraid of. In my experience, just keeping it in your head makes it hard to pin down because the mind is so squirrelly. It flits all over the place! 

But if you take the fears that pop into your mind and write them down and then come back to them a bit later, you're able to see things more objectively. That helps you know if what you thought you were afraid of reflects your real fears. It's almost as if you're reading what someone else wrote down—someone who was asking you to help them. When you see it on paper like that you to may see right away that you've mis-identified what you're really afraid of.


If you are feeling discomfort or fear about something you have to do, do you have practices to help you overcome those feelings?

I do a few things. First, I remind myself that no one is as concerned with how I'll do at something as I am. We tend to be our own worse critics even though that criticism usually bears no resemblance to what actually took place. Knowing this helps me not take my fears and discomforts so seriously. After the interview you mentioned ended, the people in the room told me I did a great job, but all I could think of was the stuff I'd left out. It was that inner critic again. I've learned to ignore it for the most part—to even label it ("Oh you silly inner critic") and even laugh at it—and then just forge ahead despite my fears or discomfort. (Here's a piece I wrote for Psychology Today on how to tame that inner critic: "A Sure-Fire Way to Silence Your Inner Critic.")

Second, I remind myself that things rarely—truly rarely—go the way I think they will and that's another good reason not to take my fears so seriously: what I'm fearing rarely comes to pass.

Finally, I often ask myself, "What's the worst that can happen?" So, for example, take that interview. The worse that could have happened was that it might not have been a good interview. Well, given the whole of my life, does it really matter that one interview didn't go well? No! 

As for the "payback" from the interview due to my illness, what's the worse that can happen? I'll feel extra sick for a few days. Since I really wanted to do this interview (retired U.C. Davis faculty and staff are being interviewed for a campus video history), it was worth the payback. So, basically, as is helpful with so many things in life, I weigh the pros and cons of something and, in this case, the pros of doing the interview outweighed the cons of the effort to do it and the "payback," so I just went ahead and did it. And I'm glad I did.

I'm not suggesting that any of this is easy. It can take courage (clearly pursuing professional photography has taken a tremendous amount of courage on your part). One of my favorite movie lines comes from a little known film called Bounce starring Gwenyth Paltrow and Ben Affleck. Affleck's character is afraid of something and Paltrow's character says to him, "It's not brave if you're not scared." That may not always be true but, for some reason, this line has stuck with me. It's helped me feel brave even when I'm afraid and that makes it easier to forge ahead and just do it!