What are you making your fear mean?
I’ve said before that fear isn’t really the problem we think it is. Fear comes up whenever we take something that matters to us and bring it out for others to see. If you wait until you stop feeling afraid to do the bold thing you want to do, you’ll have to wait until it stops mattering to you.
The truth is, most of the time for creative people doing what they love, your endeavors aren’t going to bring about certain death. And you know this, so it’s really frustrating to have all these doubts and fears hounding you when logically, you know you’ll be okay.
Something happens inside this disconnect: we try to EXPLAIN our emotion. If I’m doubting myself, there must be a reason! Oh no…maybe I’m not actually cut out for this!
In other words, no matter how well we understand logically that fear and doubt are always going to come up around things that are important to us, we still expect ourselves to not feel fear or doubt.
We expect that, if we really were ready, we wouldn’t feel doubt.
We make the doubts mean that we must not be ready.
Your brain’s biggest, most important job is to keep you safe. Not to make you happy and fulfilled. Much of your brain’s resources are always dedicated to looking for danger. If you start feeling nervous about your new creative project, the brain says, “she’s nervous! There must be a reason, and I need to find the culprit so I can protect her from it!” And now your brain puts on a superhero cape to protect you from your Big Mean Book Idea.
And because safety is so fundamentally crucial to staying alive, when the brain is trying to protect you, it gets LOUD, and you are GOING to pay attention. You can’t help it! You literally experience your brain’s messages as uncomfortable sensations or big emotions or internal yelling, because it’s supposed to go big to get your attention. Nothing wrong with you here.
Our emotions serve an important evolutionary purpose, and some of them are amazing to experience. It’s also helpful to realize when we make them mean something that’s not helpful.
Fear is going to come along for the ride, might as well package it in a way that’s helpful.
Doubt comes up when you’re doing something new. Fear comes up when you’re doing something that matters to you. They’re not reliable indicators of whether you’re ready or good enough.
This isn’t easy stuff. You can’t just beat yourself up out of your own biology, which is what we often try to do. I’m a broken record, I know, but the best place I know of to start having a better perspective around the doubts and fears that plague us is to be kinder to ourselves.
Feeling afraid sucks. Let it suck. Have a lot of gentleness around that. Yeah, my dear, it does suck. What happens if you try to give yourself permission to actually feel that fear, knowing that it’s simply doing its job, everyone experiences this, and you don’t have to make it mean that there’s something wrong with you?
For me and many others I’ve worked with, what happens is that things calm down enough to see more clearly.