How to Not Be Fearful 

So, before we learn how to overcome our fear, we should first know what fear is and why we experience it in the first place. The moment we think that our physical or psychological security is at risk, we feel fear. 

An example will help us understand it in a much better way. 

Let’s take a story as an example. A man named Chris saw someone looking into his house in the middle of the night. The man was trying to break into Chris’s house. Scared for the safety of his family, Chris immediately called the police and later, in the morning, he installed a new safety system in his house. 

So in this example, Chris’s fear was triggered when he predicted that the man looking into his house may have intended to rob it or even worse, harm Chris’s family. The prediction of future pain triggered his fear. 

Fear shows us the chinks in our armour, the places where our defence can be beefed up. It points directly to our insecurity. 

By noticing our insecurity and the holes in our defence, we can work on them and patch them up. Just like Chris installed a new security system. By doing this, he overcame his fear and he felt more secure in his home. 

Fear pinpoints the ways in which the things that we value are threatened, and overcoming that fear shows us the ways in which we can secure what we value. Like in this example, when the thief shows up near Chris’s house, he fears because Chris values the security of his family and perceives danger to it. But as fear shows Chris what he values, it also shows him the way to secure what he values the most (his family’s security), by installing the security system. 

In this sense, what we value hides behind what we fear. Or as Joseph Campbell said, “The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.” 

So, for example, if we are afraid of public speaking, we should ask ourselves what we are fearful of. For example, if we realise that we are fearful of getting embarrassed, we know that the thing we value the most is our image in front of everyone. 

But why would we lose our image? Why would we get embarrassed? Maybe, because we lack confidence and mastery of the material. 

So now that we have an answer, we can work towards gathering more knowledge about the subjects we need to know and also take public speaking classes to build our confidence. 

The conclusion is that we should not take our fear as a sign of avoiding something, like avoiding public speaking. Instead, we should take our fear as a signal to prepare, and only by preparation, a reward can be achieved. 

And when you are fully prepared, you will fear nothing.