Ah, Madame Fear.
Always on duty.
You have an idea? Her little weasel face pops up.
Thinking about changing jobs? She pulls up a chair and joins the table.
Want to say something important to someone? She orders a coffee, takes off her coat and clearly, she intends to stay.
And she has a few classics in her repertoire:
“Maybe this isn’t the right time.”
“What if you screw it up?”
“What will they think of you?”
“Maybe you should think about it a little longer.”
That last one is particularly sneaky because it sounds like healthy caution. Except that sometimes you’ve been “thinking about it a little longer” for three years.
But unlike what you regularly read in personal development, I am not going to tell you that fear is an illusion you simply need to conquer.
Fear exists. And courage, after all, is not the absence of fear.
Fear therefore has very good reasons to exist.
The more interesting question is:
Is this fear still protecting me… or has it started making decisions for me? Or even… shitting in my boots?
Fear is not your enemy
Let’s give Madame Fear her due.
Fear is an extraordinarily useful mechanism.
When faced with a threat, our body mobilises responses that can help us flee, fight or freeze. Our attention changes. Our body prepares itself. Our perception of risk shifts.
In short, fear did not take up residence in our brain solely to stop us asking for a pay rise.
Its main role is… survival.
And contrary to the slightly caricatural mammoth metaphor I used in the past, our brain does not react only to dangers capable of eating us.
Human beings are social creatures.
Rejection, humiliation, loss of status, uncertainty and failure can therefore represent particularly powerful threats.
Your boss may not look like a sabre-toothed tiger (well, I hope not; otherwise change companies quickly!), but the idea of standing up to them can still trigger a very real fear response.
So why do some fears stop us in our tracks?
Because fear does not need to correspond to an immediate danger in order to affect us.
Take someone who wants to change careers.
Their fear may say:
“You’ll lose your financial security.”
That is useful information.
We can work with it.
Run the numbers.
Plan a transition.
Build a safety net.
But it may also say:
“What if you discover you’re not capable?”
Then:
“What if everyone thinks this decision is ridiculous?”
Then:
“Maybe you should wait until you’re absolutely certain.”
And here we arrive at one of my favourite little marvels:
waiting to feel reassured before taking action.
On paper, it is ideal, seductive and so much more reassuring. Except that in real life, sometimes it is impossible.
Because some information only exists after you act.
You cannot know exactly how you will feel in a new profession before you have experienced it enough.
You cannot know how someone will react before you have the conversation (or before working with an experienced coach who can role-play the scene with you and help you prepare).
You cannot know whether your project will work before confronting it, at least partly, with reality.
At some point, more thinking no longer produces more information.
It simply produces more thinking.
The real trap: avoidance works brilliantly well and feeds inertia
And this is where it gets properly vicious.
Imagine you are afraid to speak during a meeting.
The meeting begins.
Your heart speeds up.
You had something to say.
Probably something very interesting too. And…
In the end, you say nothing.
And immediately…
relief.
Congratulations: your brain has just learned something.
“Not speaking = discomfort disappears.” Yay, what a crap lesson.
So the next time the situation occurs, avoidance becomes extremely tempting.
That is one reason some fears can gradually shrink our field of action.
Not because we are weak.
But because avoidance is bloody effective in the short term.
The problem arrives with the long-term bill.
“Get out of your comfort zone”: yes, but not any old way!
Here again, personal development has managed to turn an interesting idea into something printable on a mug.
GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE.
Very good, Gérard. But how far, exactly?
Because between comfort and absolute panic, there are a few interesting nuances.
The goal is not to throw yourself deliberately into the situation that terrifies you most and hope for a spiritual revelation in the middle of a panic attack.
A much smarter objective might be:
gradually increase your ability to act despite a certain level of discomfort.
And for that, we can experiment.
This is where coaching can become particularly concrete
Suppose your difficulty is asserting yourself.
We could spend an entire hour talking about your fear of conflict.
That might be useful.
But we can also do something else.
We can manufacture the conflict.
Not with boxing gloves, I do run a respectable practice after all, but I can play the insistent colleague, the unhappy client, the toxic manager who asks:
“Yes, but just this once, surely you could still…”
And you can try, stumble over your words, get it wrong in a sandbox.
Your first response may be far too aggressive (and that’s okay, that’s the game, my poor Lucette).
The second may sound like an apology.
The third will start sounding like you.
And suddenly, we are no longer discussing your ability to set boundaries in the abstract.
You are learning how to set one! (And I’ll be bouncing with joy watching you succeed!)
Fear of failure also deserves a little failure
Here is another thing I love working on.
Someone who is deeply afraid of failure can spend an enormous amount of energy avoiding every situation in which they might fail.
The problem is obvious:
that also eliminates an impressive number of situations in which they might succeed.
So sometimes we can turn the problem around.
Not:
“How can I be certain I’ll succeed?”
But:
“How can I try without needing this attempt to succeed?”
Small test.
Prototype.
Exploratory conversation.
Application.
Request.
Experiment.
An action small enough that failure would not be catastrophic, but real enough to produce information.
Because one tiny failure in the real world can sometimes teach you more than three weeks spent imagining a gigantic failure in your head, or worse, living only in the safety of NEVER making a mistake.
What if your fear is right?
Yep.
That happens too.
Afraid of losing money by launching your project?
Possible.
Afraid someone will react badly when you set a boundary?
Possible.
Afraid a major change will be difficult?
Obviously.
The purpose of coaching is not to turn every fear into a negative thought to be exterminated with inspirational quotes.
Sometimes fear contains relevant information.
So we can ask it:
“What are you trying to protect me from?”
Then examine the answer.
If the risk is real: how can we reduce it?
If it is acceptable: are we willing to take it?
If it is disproportionate: how can we test it?
And if fear prevents us from living normally, becomes overwhelming or is part of an anxiety disorder: coaching may simply not be the right tool, and a mental-health professional will be more appropriate.
So the right question is not always:
“How do I conquer my fear?”
But:
“What do I want to do with the information it is giving me?”
Courage is not the absence of fear
Ultimately, I find it much more interesting to stop treating fear as an adversary.
Because if you wait until you are no longer afraid before acting, Madame Fear has one particularly effective argument:
“Not today.”
So perhaps the goal is not to make her disappear.
Perhaps the goal is to be able to answer:
“Yes, I heard you. Now move over a little; I’ve got something to try.”
And go anyway.
So remember, Madame Fear. She’s got potential, the bitch, but she does not get to stop you living on the pretext of stopping you dying. 😏