A superb coach in her own right with hundreds of hours of successful coaching experience, Maggie Currie, The People Magician is a popular International Advanced Confidence Coach, Group Trainer, Personal Life Coach, Corporate & Executive Coach, NLP Practitioner, Mentor, Speaker & published Author.

Here she shares her thoughts on fear and how to overcome it.
Is fear actually real?

The feeling of fear. What is it? Describe it?

When I ask this of myself and others, the replies are the thoughts people have about fear and not a description of the “feeling” of fear.

That is not unexpected, after all it is the left brain’s, rational/analytical job to put into words feelings that arise from somewhere in our bodies, the subconscious.

Instinct, intuition, imagination and everything else that’s in the right brain doesn’t generally speak to us.

The subconscious mind speaks and thinks in pictures, senses and sensations, urges, vibrations, waves, patterns, connections and possibly in other intangible ways.

So when we talk about fear we are actually talking about our thinking. We are talking about the mind’s attempt to translate our physiological responses through thought & language and how it tries to make rational sense.

I believe our emotions are just that, authentic feelings being expressed in thought. And fear is just such an emotion.

That’s what’s making me think that fear doesn’t really exist in any other dimension of our being. I believe it is possible that there is no such thing as fear outside of the subconscious mind. That fear is not real. The case has been made in the past that fear is necessary for self-preservation. But is it?

The fight or flight survival response is an occurrence that happens without thought. It really doesn’t have the time to be otherwise.

Look at something you are ‘scared of‘, a spider, a bear, a clown. Do you feel fear or are you thinking fear?

If you were to walk around the corner and come face to face with a huge grizzly bear, you would definitely feel something right away. But is that feeling fear?

If you listen to people who have encountered survival situations, whether they be stopping someone falling off a cliff, ripping the door off a burning car, disarming a man with a knife, they will say their sense in that moment was not fear. They were too busy with their actions.

Fear after the act, yes.

We have all felt that thing that our mind has labelled fear. But is that what it really is? I don’t think so.

FEAR =
False
Expectations
Appearing
Real

With a whole lot of what ifs thrown in.

Think about the interview scenario: You are sitting waiting to go into that room, you think ‘what if there are ten people on the panel‘, ‘what if they ask me questions I can’t answer‘, ‘what if they are all wearing suits‘.

What are you actually afraid of? You are not afraid of the panel, you are not afraid of the questions, you are not afraid of the suits.

You are not afraid of the reality, but of the negative expectation, or thoughts, of what you imagine might happen next.

But if any of those things did really upset you that much, you would take flight and there really wouldn’t be any thought involved at all.

Your intuition and instinct rule your fight or flight response. it is a fact that only 2% of our fears actually occur, the other 98% are just imagined.

Trust in your intuition and don’t let false expectations drive your life.