Day 111: Response to the article of Highly Confident People.
Many good ideas and quotes in this article, and I very much enjoyed the read.
Fear is a liar. Not the kind of fear you get when you see a tornado touching down close to your house, or an animal acting strangely around you (because they might have rabies), or you are stuck in an abusive situation and you know something bad is going to happen. That is what I refer to as justifiable fear. The kind that you described as a built in ‘portal’, if you will, in our brains to take some sort of an action to save ourselves. A very much needed aspect to staying alive. You can’t stop a tornado so your value is your life, but you will probably have it mixed with emotions. Similar, to an abusive situation — you may not be able to get away from it, and you will definitely have emotions about it, and you WILL place a value somewhere about it, but it is going to shape you, somehow, and even though the past does not have to define our future, it does for awhile.
The fear that I call a liar are the fears that the constant chatter in our head continues to tell us we can’t, unrelenting sometimes; the fear of success, or the fear of trusting love (based on bad past experiences), or the fear that you aren’t good enough to accomplish something — a better position, a higher degree, being equal in a relationship. When your mind is spinning with all the negative thoughts and projections, if you haven’t started training your mind to act differently, you will of course get the same results, the ones you don’t want. But, it’s not just as simple as following the four ways you mentioned. As you are a psychologist, I know you know it is more complicated than that.
Limiting beliefs about ourselves or situations will paralyze our actions to change, unless we can learn some ways to halt the thoughts. Some don’t even know they are functioning from a deeper, subconscious belief because they don’t know where it came from, so they don’t know how to change it. Change comes with constant and daily training, if we are repeating actions that keep sabotaging results. Some people do need therapy, and some just need to break old habits and learn new ways.
For instance, when I am projecting negative thoughts about something I am trying to accomplish because my belief says it should happen in a certain way and it isn’t, I have trained myself to say outload, “stop”, it didn’t happen that way (because my thought was a projection of future events) and the end result is not finished, yet. I have learned to start giving thanks for the opportunity to learn it a different way. And, where needed, I ask for the teacher to come so that I can learn and move on. Not everyone is a good teacher, though. It is ok to recognize that and seek out someone new.
I can name my fears and un-beliefs all day long, and may even know where they come from. And, yes, emotion can throw the whole thing off. I know I will get another opportunity to make a change because that’s just what life does — it changes the colors but comes back to teach us. Then, add what we think others are thinking about us and it complicates it more. But, sometimes we need to remove ourselves because it isn’t going to work, and that can become fearful because we can slide into complacency and even if we don’t like a situation, it somehow became comfortable.
I start asking myself if my thought is a fact, or something I am making up to distract me. Maybe I just won’t get the better position if I don’t have the skills or education. Or, maybe I can get the better position and make it work if I just stay one chapter ahead of the rest, or I create a network around me who can teach me and help me see it through. We all need others.
I have a fear of heights, too, but it is because I have a feeling of dizziness, and whether that feeling is really a physical thing or a thought manifesting that feeling, I don’t care. I will not be jumping out of planes to get over it. Just not going to happen. I’ll find confidence, elsewhere.
I believe it was Sally Fields who said, “I got tired of looking at myself through other people’s eyes.” Amen to that.
