How I Turned My Fears Into My Greatest Weapon
Lessons I learned from a former monk, internet lifestyle guru and late-night TV host
Photo by Marina Vitale on Unsplash
Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life. — Buddha
Fear makes us great fiction writers.
Through fear, we become the J.K. Rowling of our lives and create stories about who we are and what we do. We imagine elaborate plots, villains, and heroes. Constantly binge-watching the same story over and over again.
Your imagination is better than Netflix because it is free and requires no Wifi to access. But unlike Harry Potter, these are stories you don’t want other people viewing. They make for grim viewing with no real ending.
This is why the stories you tell yourself matter. They become an identity that can either trap you or set you free. If you think you’re worthless, you will act and think in ways that reinforce it.
You become what you repeatedly think.
Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose between having a story of your life or not having one at all.
We all have stories.
The choice is whether you have a conscious story or an unconscious story. And therefore, whether you live a life on your own terms or play out a pre-programmed script you inherited.
Transforming your life is transforming your relationship with your fears. Once accomplished, you have the freedom to start to tell yourself a new story. A positive one with a new identity and accompanying set of behaviors.
You are not the story you tell yourself.
But self-authoring a new life story takes time.
You’ll go through multiple drafts and iterations. You might even need a professional editor. Some people might not like your new story. Others will love it. The point is:
There is no change in your life story without a change in your life fears.
Whether you suppress them or run away from them, your fears and problems remain with you — and they accumulate — Jay Shetty.
The Importance of Fear
Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than reality. — Seneca.
Like any emotion, fear helps to guide our lives.
Our ancestors used fear to run away from predators, build shelter and protect our families. Fear kept us safe, warm, and well-fed. But now with our most basic needs taken care of, we misapply fear in the modern world.
When our brains register something as ‘FEAR’ your body and mind can’t differentiate between whether the threat is real or imagined or whether your life is at risk or you’re thinking about a stressful work project.
As soon as that fear signal goes off, our bodies prepare us to fight, flee or freeze. Entering this heightened state too often is detrimental to our health.
Since we aren’t facing a real tiger, our natural instinct is to neglect or ignore our fears. Put it to one side and try to numb or distract ourselves. But when we deny fear, our problems follow us. “What you run from only stays with you longer,” writes Chuck Palahniuk.
Just remember: what you resist, persists.
But when used correctly, fear is a great teacher. It has the ability to teach you about yourself if you know how to use it productively.
“Often, we notice fear’s warning but ignore its guidance. If we learn how to recognize what fear can teach us about ourselves and what we value, then we can use it as a tool to obtain greater meaning, purpose and fulfillment in our lives”, writes former monk Jay Shetty in his book Think Like a Monk.
He goes on to say:
In order to change our relationship with fear, we have to change our perception of it. Once we can see the value that fear offers, we can change how we respond to it.
Like how you can train your body to operate under stress and resistance, you can train your mind to embrace fear and use it productively.
Your fears are like mental land mines. You can choose to spend your whole life walking on your tippy-toes to avoid setting them off or you can solve the problem for good by detecting and conducting controlled explosions.
So whether you ignore it or avoid it, fear will come for you. Having fears is not optional, but how you respond to them is. So the question then becomes: how are you able to train your mind to become better at handling fear?
Constantly Address Your Fear
Fear’s power is surprise and uncertainty. Once you remove them, the power fear has over you is reduced or removed. Sometimes the best disinfectant for your fears is sunlight.
As you develop your relationship with your fears you’ll start to understand that like a medical diagnosis, fear has symptoms and root causes. Like a good game of Where’s Waldo? you need to interrogate the landscape of your mind to identify the true source of your fears.
Coming from first-generation Asian immigrant parents, I had three options in life: become a lawyer, a doctor, or a failure. I was born with a desire to make sure that I was a good son who pleased everyone, especially my parents.
But desire is the mask that fears and insecurity wear.
It was only when I started to ask myself but why? over and over again that I started to understand my fears.
Try this for yourself and see what comes out.
“I want to become a lawyer” but why?
“So that I can make a good living and support my parents” but why?
“So that I can prove to them I am a good son” but why?
“I am afraid of being seen as a failure” but why?
“If I am a failure I’ll be unworthy of their love” Bingo!
But repeating this question but why? rather than rephrasing it, I wasn’t able to avoid my fears. And by asking the right questions it doesn’t take long to find the root causes of your fears. They usually exist 5–6 layers beneath the surface.
Even writing that out made my heart race and my breathing deepen. Physiological signs from my body that I am close to one of my deepest fears.
There are 3 great fears that most people have:
Competence: am I a good person/son/father/mother/brother?
Love: am I worthy of love?
Identity: do I know who I am?
When you dig deep enough, most fears can be traced back to one or more of these three factors. Maybe even all of them. I would fall into the second category: am I worthy of love?
Such a simple question can have profound answers. But having questions you can’t answer is better than having answers you can’t question.
If I didn’t change my relationship to how I conceived of ‘love’ I would forever have relationships that were characterized by transactional love.
This is what I might say implicitly to my future partner or children:
“You must do X in order for me to love you.”
This is what I might say to my future self:
“If I don’t achieve X you won’t love me.”
The relationships with my future partner, children and myself wouldn’t be characterized by genuine love.
I was destined to re-enact what I experienced and feared most.
I felt this most clearly when I went through a painful breakup with my partner of 5 years. I had never felt lower than that point. Reflecting on that pain with my therapist, I was the pattern and was terrified of repeating it.
If we don’t learn from the signal that alerts us to a problem, we’ll end up learning from the results of the problem itself, which is far less desirable. -Jay Shetty.
It was like seeing into a magic ball of my 50-year-old self who grew up to be a lonely old man. Once I understood the magnitude of my fears and their implication of them, I was determined to change.
Undertake a Fear Audit
Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there — Chuck Palahnuik
Fear makes us pay attention.
Tim Ferriss’ TedTalk demonstrates the power of planning our fears rather than planning our goals. I won’t reiterate everything from the TedTalk, but this quote stood out to me:
Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if we try something new. What we don’t often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo.
— Tim Ferriss
There is power in quantifying your fears.
And there is even more power in quantifying the consequences of staying the same. “It’s often said that when the fear of staying the same outweighs the fear of change, that is when we change,” writes Jay Shetty.
I’ve made it a point to list all my fears. No matter how big or small. Real or perceived. There is no judgment. I write each fear on a post-it note so I can see them all in front of me.
Regularly meditating and thinking about my fears puts them into perspective. I can see how they hold me back or how many of my actions were based on fear.
Gradual exposure to my fears removed their power over me.
The Stoics had a saying of ‘Momento Mori’ a Latin phrase that loosely translates to ‘remember you must die.’ Grim. I know. By all accounts, The Stoics weren’t the happiest of people.
But the basic idea of this philosophy is that if people remember their inescapable deaths, they will lead more sober lives, live in the present, and take advantage of opportunities.
The same goes for your fears.
When you’re able to say ‘I see you’ and ‘I know what your value is’ to your fears, the power they have over you diminishes. When done properly, the gap between fear and gratitude becomes smaller and smaller.
Eventually, you might even start to feel grateful for your fears. They helped you realize where you were going wrong in your life and what you needed to do to change.
Detach From Your Fears
When we track our fears to their source, most of us find that they’re closely related to attachment. Our need to own and control things. — Jay Shetty.
In Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech to the Dartmouth class of 2011, he reflected on his public and less-than-amicable departure from The Tonight Show in 2009 and a subsequent TV hiatus.
It had been his lifelong dream to host The Tonight Show and being fired from the show after only 7 months almost broke him. He had left a system that had nurtured him for almost a decade and was set adrift with no direction.
Hitting rock bottom, Conan abandons all preconceived notions of his career.
He goes on to say:
Fogbound with no compass and adrift, I started trying things. I grew a strange cinnamon beard. I dove into the world of social media. I started tweeting my comedy. I threw together a national tour. I played the guitar. I did stand up. Wore a skin-tight blue leather suit, recorded an album, made a documentary and frightened my friends and family.
Ultimately I abandoned all preconceived notions of my career path and stature and took a job on basic cable.
I did a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous and seemingly irrational things. And guess what? With the exception of the blue leather suit, it was the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life.
To this day, I still don’t understand exactly what happened. But I have never had more fun, been more challenged and this is important, never had more conviction about what I was doing.
After this life-changing experience, this is what Conan O’Brien realized:
There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fears realized. (minute 19).
It wasn’t until I went to university and I started to volunteer, take on weird projects, and experiment with alternative career paths that I realized that not becoming my perceived ideal was going to be okay.
Instead, I became the CEO of a volunteer organization at the age of 21. Started my own consulting business at the age of 22 and completed a 15,000-word Honours thesis on education policy, receiving First Class Honours.
Most of my family and friends didn’t really understand what I was doing.
To some, I might have been seen as a failure.
But once I started living for myself and letting go of what others expected of me did I start to feel liberated.
In some ways, I had become what I feared most: letting people down.
It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.
It is not easy.
But if you accept your misfortune and handle it right. Your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention.
— Conan O’Brien
By constantly addressing my fears, understanding why they exist, and taking small actions to expose me to my greatest fears, I no longer feared fear itself. I embraced it.
Don’t get me wrong. I still fear my fears. But my reactions to them are very different.
Fear is something I feel, but it is not me. I feel them but I am not of them. I can feel fear and express gratitude instead. This sense of detachment provides a choice. And with that choice comes freedom.
Now at 26, I still have a lot of work to do. But I have a better relationship with my fears and use them as a useful guide in my life. While most of the world ignores their fears, I use mine to transform my life for the better.
“When we identify our attachment-related fears and instead foster detachment, we can live with a greater sense of freedom and enjoyment,” writes Jay Shetty.
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