One of these has probably affected you at one point or another. One of these probably is bothering you now, or you wouldn’t be here. There’s a very thin line between them and jumping from one to another sometimes happens without you knowing it. So…if you see one, start to notice it and try to get rid of it.
As I can’t say this enough: all negative emotions and reactions we have come from one single common denominator, fear. Frustration is the first born out of it, this then births anxiety, this then can go into either anger or stress. Or both. The time frame spent on one of these phases can vary greatly between situations and changes with the importance given to the fear generating it, and with the pressure of the environment during the previous phase. Some of us stop at frustration, some at anxiety, some … don’t stop anywhere and it grows into some exponential blow up of uncontrolled behavior. Well, nasty stuff…
So no matter with which of these you struggle, please stop for a second and think what are you afraid of and why?
Are you afraid you’ll be losing something? Are you afraid you are not good enough? Are you afraid of falling into the patterns of the past? Or what? And then, sincerely and openly ask yourself: why?
For example: Marry is afraid to ask for a promotion but is anxious and stressed to do well at her job and is actually doing great work but with great implications. Marry is a smart, hard-working person and all her colleagues appreciate her. There would be no logical reason for her anxiety and stress. Yet here they are. The reason behind it is the fear of not being good enough, the fear that if she spoke up something bad will happen. What can actually happen though? Can be a rejection, a no change or a promotion. These are the only 3 options. Logical thinking: a hard-working, well-trained, smart and appreciated person will not be less appreciated for aiming higher. Her fear comes from attempts during childhood to show her value, attempts that were repeatedly rejected by her parents, telling her “you’re just a kid, don’t think of such things”. For a child, any child, there’s nothing to hurt more than the rejection from his own parents, the lack of acknowledgement of your value by the people you love most and look up to. Children will not understand the reasons behind a parent’s statement in an elaborate manner, but will feel it as rejection and it will remain with them into adulthood unless revisited and solved differently. This fear stayed with her to date and she can’t see it or explain it. Once she realizes where it comes from and that the actual situation is totally different, she can grow into her real potential, the truth is: she’s a well-trained, well performing, much appreciated grown-up for whom it is normal to want to step forward. So finding the origins of a fear, the limiting belief that generates it and seeing the situation with adult eyes and knowledge can change your limiting fears and beliefs.
The more you fear something, the more you actually attract it. This is not just another talk about the law of attraction. It’s not (just) that, it’s simply because fearing something you’re acting in a “preventive” way, defensive way, predictive way which chains similar reactions from the world surrounding you and hence drives you exactly into that situation. You may not see it, they might not acknowledge it. Yet people pick up these “subtle” hints you give out subconsciously and will react to them with your exact (much feared) expected scenario most times even when they don’t want to or don’t acknowledge doing it. If you “fear” that someone will react in some way, your behavior, voice, words, face movements, eye contact, etc. might actually give that out or come as a forestall and it will render the exact expectation you were fearing of. So stop it!
Act normal, there’s no reason to fear something that doesn’t exist yet and that might never even come to exist. Our minds are good at building scenarios of unwanted things and then feeding these with 1000 reasons as we try to make sense out of it. Not a good idea to even try. Simply cause that’s how your brain is trained. It is built to keep you alive, and while we grow up it gets wired to avoid the “no-no’s” so it will always try to pick up the “no-no” parts from everything, just so it is prepared.
How about the yes parts? Nothing to fear there, so no preventive thinking involved in that area generally. 🙂 But you can change this thinking the second you acknowledge it.
See, we have to train ourselves into seeing the good parts in things, as we are (mostly) brought up by only reinforcing the negatives. “Don’t do this”/ “don’t touch that” / “don’t say that” OR…” x, y, x bad thing might happen”! Right? So our brains keep this thinking for the rest of our lives cause that’s how most of our neural pathways have been wired up for years. Unless… we snap out of it and realize it is no longer needed. We now know how things work, what is appropriate and what not. Hence the “Don’t / or else” isn’t doing us much good, unless you can incorporate in the “or else” all the good turnarounds too. And trust me, usually they outnumber the bad ones.
First of all, analyze your fear. Is it logic? Is it founded? What built this fear into your mind in the first place?
Now look at this situation and see why it is not the same with the original one that built your fear. Circumstances, age, people, knowledge, everything is different now, plus there’s a chance that you didn’t interpret the original situation in the right way in the first place. The one and only thing in common is your fear, a fear that probably got bigger with time – cause you fed it. You are different, you’ve grown, changed, became wiser (believe it or not) and can deal with things that come your way in different ways than you did before. You don’t need the “don’t / or else” statements in your mind anymore.
See how this is not serving you in any way and understand the mechanics of fear. It actually “impairs” you (so to speak) both physically and mentally from acting normal, wise, loving or peaceful. It doesn’t help you in any way, and you don’t need in your life anything that doesn’t help you in any way. Right? So… what’cha waiting for? Get rid of it! You can do it!
Trust the old cherokee proverb saying: There are two wolves within us having a fight. Which one wins? The one you feed!
Stop feeding the fear.
My Motivation Coach 