I read an interesting history book a while back.
It’s premise was that all of human history could be described as a timid, lazy people.
All of the major historical events were driven primarily by two goals.
One to make things less scary, and two to make them easier.
Scared and lazy people making things easier and less scary.
Now, this is just one way of looking at things. One thing about NLP is you learn that “meaning” is pretty flexible.
Sure, if you’re measuring how many grams something is in a laboratory, there’s not much room for coming up with different meanings.
But any time you have anything related to the human experience, or even a biological experience (trees growing, etc.) meaning really IS flexible.
Which is good news when we’re talking about things that scare us.
I’m sure you’ve heard the popular “self-help” description of FEAR:
False Enemies Appearing Real.
Sounds cool, sounds like you know what’s up, but just coming up with smart sounding sayings like that doesn’t really help much when you’ve got to stand up in front of people and give an impromptu speech.
You can tell yourself that your fears are false until you’re blue in the face, but when you stand up, everybody gets quiet and looks at you, it’s kind of hard to logic your way out of being petrified.
So, how exactly do make that “truism” real?
How do we actually FEEL that our fears are false, rather than pretending we’re all that?
Practice, that’s how.
One of the things about being human is we are all born WAY before we are fully developed.
Meaning the first years of our lives, our brains are a sponge.
Unfortunately, we tend to soak up both TRUE things about the world around us, and FALSE things.
Since our brains were designed for a much different time, being “safe” rather than “sorry” makes our young brains a lot less discriminating.
So we learn that a lot of things are scary, even when they’re not.
Problem is that here we are as adults, with those learned experienced programmed into us like they are instincts.
So they those “false” fears FEEL just as real as the REAL fears.
Luckily, we can slowly dismantle the false ones, and keep the real ones.
By focused visualization, mental exercises, journaling and other “tricks.”
It’s not magic, and it does take time.
But imagine what you’ll be able to do when you’re ONLY afraid of things you SHOULD be afraid of? Like escaped tigers and jumping out of airplanes.
Learn How: