What to do when you experience ‘fear’ (and why I’m not still trapped in an LA bathroom)

The theme that’s coming up in my conversations this week seems to be ‘fear’ and how it can hold us back, or at least slow us down from the things we want to. We know it, it’s frustrating, and yet it persists.

One of my friends laughingly said,

“oh yeah, I had a coach once who thought the way to deal with it was to help his clients move so fast that fear doesn’t have a chance to catch them.”

I laughed but I was also kinda surprised that anyone would fall for that — it looks to me like the very definition of a dog chasing its tail.

Sure, you can outrun fear, but only in the way a tail outruns a dog. It’s always ahead of you but it’s never going away — until you see it’s a tail and then you can decide whether that’s the game you want to play, or whether you’d rather play a more interesting game like chasing a ball, or chewing a bone.

What even IS ‘fear’?

When I ask, people will usually associate the fear they’re feeling with something real — oh yes, it’s fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being seen. It looks as if the fear is entangled with a set of circumstances and we need to either learn how to manage the feeling, or we need to change the…