Run toward your fear

Run toward your fear

The world's best-kept secret is that on the other side of your fear there
is something safe and beneficial waiting for you. If you pass through
even a thin curtain of fear you will increase the confidence you have in
your ability to create your life.
General George Patton said, "Fear kills more people than death." Death
kills us but once, and we usually don't even know it. But fear kills us
over and over again, subtly at times and brutally at others. But if we
keep trying to avoid our fears, they will chase us down like persistent
dogs. The worst thing we can do is close our eyes and pretend they don't
exist.
"Fear and pain," says psychologist Nathaniel Branden, "should be
treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider." By
closing our eyes we end up in the darkest of comfort zones—buried
alive.
Janis Joplin's biography, which chronicled her death from alcohol and
drug abuse, was aptly titled Buried Alive. To Janis, as to so many
similarly troubled people, alcohol provided an artificial and tragically
temporary antidote to fear. It is no accident that in the old frontier days
the nickname for whiskey was "false courage."
There was a time in my life, not too many years ago, when my greatest
fear of all was public speaking. It didn't even help that fear of speaking
in front of people was people's number one fear, even greater than the
fear of death. This fact once caused comedian Jerry Seinfeld to point
out that most people would rather be in the coffin than delivering the
eulogy.
For me, it ran even deeper than that. As a child I could not give oral
book reports. I'd plead with my teachers to let me off the hook. I would
offer to do two, even

three written book reports if I didn't have to do the oral one.
Yet as my life went on, I wanted to be a public speaker more than
anything. My dream was to teach people everywhere to learn the ideas
that lead to self-motivation, the ideas that I had learned. But how could
I ever do this if stage fright left me frozen with fear?
Then one day as I was driving in Phoenix flipping through the radio
stations looking for good music, I accidentally happened upon a
religious station where a histrionic preacher was yelling, "Run toward
your fear! Run right at it!" I hastened to change the station, but it was
too late. Deep down I knew that I had just heard something I needed to
hear. No matter what station I turned to, all I could hear was that
madman's words: "Run toward your fear!"
The next day I still couldn't get it out of my mind, so I called a friend of
mine who was an actress. I asked her to help me get into an acting class
she had once told me about. I told her I thought I was ready to
overcome my fear of performing in front of people.
Although I lived in a high state of anxiety the first weeks of that class,
there was no other way around my fear. There was no real way to run
from it any longer, because the more I ran, the more pervasive it got. I
knew I had to turn around and run toward the fear or I would never
pass through it.
Emerson once said, "The greater part of courage is having done it
before," and that soon became true of my speaking in public. Fear of
doing it can only be cured by doing it. And soon my confidence was
built by doing it again and again.
The rush we get after running through the waterfall of fear is the most
energizing feeling in the world. If

you are ever in an undermotivated mood, find something you fear and
do it—and watch what happens.

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