They say the word ‘Fear’ can stand for two things: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise’.
Inner Leadership gives us a step by step guide for how we can make it mean the second, by using fear to make us stronger and more valuable.
There’s no silver bullet to achieving this. Instead we need to strengthen our abilities at seven key skills:
- The first is our ability to centre and ground, remain calm in a crisis, and connect strongly with who we are at our best, no matter what is happening around us
- ‘Fear’ can also stand for ‘False Evidence Appearing Real’ so the second key skill is the ability to make clearer sense of the situation and to spot the mistaken assumptions we might be making
- The third and fourth abilities are to find the opportunities that exist in a crisis and then choose the one that aligns best with our deepest priorities, even when the situation is unclear and the outcome highly uncertain
- The fifth step comes from knowing and refining our purpose and values: these not only bring us alignment and direction but also flexibility and inspiration
- And the sixth and seventh abilities are the skills that enable us to articulate our chosen way forward in ways that inspire us and the people around us to long to make it happen
If we look back through our life we can probably remember a dozen times when we felt afraid: our first day at a new school, our first driving lesson, our first date, our first job. And every time this happened, behind the fear there was also an opportunity to learn and grow, if we stepped up.
If fear is keeping us stuck again today, we need to remember this and step up again.
Because when we find what we most want to do, and we learn the skills we need to inspire ourselves to do that, then even something as apparently terrifying as riding a rodeo bull can simply become an adventure!
This is another step to becoming antifragile.
When did you last feel afraid? Would it be useful to know how to reinterpret your fears and turn them into joy and fulfilment instead? Face Everything And Rise.
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)
Photo By Southern Arkansas University (cropped) via StockPholio.net