Learn To Undo Your Fear Programmes

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I said I’d help you begin to get over your fear(s), so to kick it off, here is a large tip about fear from Michael Neill.

I have come to the conclusion over the past few months that 99.9% of fear is mere superstition and completely unnecessary. Although we believe fear is essential in order to motivate us and to keep us safe, it is in fact a poor substitute for inspiration, knowledge and intuition.

* The inspiration to live a life you love will carry you long after the adrenaline burst from fearing a life you hate has burned out.

*The knowledge of what would happen if you were hit by a car is more than enough to get most of us to look both ways before we cross the street, even if we no longer hear our parents’ voices ringing in our ears to ’stay back’.

*Our intuitive awareness of danger will let us know not to trust the smiling stranger even when our love/hate relationship with fear will try to confuse the issue.

In his wonderful book ‘The Gift of Fear’, Gavin DeBecker, the man Oprah Winfrey called ‘the nation’s leading expert on violent behavior,’ makes a similar point: “Fear is not an emotion like sadness or happiness, either of which might last a long while. It is not a state, like anxiety. True fear is a survival signal that sounds only in the presence of danger.”

In other words, unless there is a clear and present danger, there is no purpose served by feeling fear. In fact, the continual sense of worry and anxiety so many of us live with tends to blind us to any authentic awareness of danger. Like the boy who cried wolf, our continual fearful response to our fantasies about the future interferes with our ability to respond to any actual danger.

We can safely live without fear if we are willing to honor three inner signals:

1. Our no-brainer ‘yes’ signal
2. Our no-brainer ‘no’ signal
3. Our ‘let’s get the heck out of here now and figure out why later’ signal

When I first made this distinction for myself a few months ago, I decided to begin an experiment into what it would be like to live without fear. While I have since begun to share the experiment with my clients, I waited to talk about it here until I had a bit more experience with it.

What convinced me to go ahead was a trip I took last Sunday to an amusement park with my son. In the past, I’ve always been a bit wary of roller coasters. This time, I was excited to put my fear-less theory to the test. Our first coaster was called Tatsu and boasted the slogan ‘flying at the speed of fear’.

Throughout the wait in line, I marveled at how calm I felt as I tuned in with my body to any possible danger and felt none. I did feel a brief rush of adrenaline as we were shut into the shoulder, hip and leg restraints, but when the carriage turned horizontal and we were lifted up vertically into the sky and dropped at 90 miles per hour towards the concrete below, I was able to watch the ground rushing up towards me and marvel at the smoothness of the ride.

By the end of the day, we rode seven separate roller coasters, amongst them two of the largest in North America. Not only did I do so without fear, I actually found myself getting a bit bored on a roller coaster called ‘Scream!’ While this may not seem a big deal to those of you who have always enjoyed thrill seeking, to me it was as revelatory as it is for someone who comes along on our NLP seminars who holds a snake or spider for the very first time. Until you do something without fear, you haven’t really done it.

So here’s the experiment:

For the next week, live as if fear is completely unnecessary. Don’t worry about it if you feel it - a lifetime of conditioning tends not to disappear overnight. Just notice when you are about to do something if it is coming from fear or ‘not-fear’, and if it’s from fear, don’t do it. Any time you aren’t sure what to do, ask yourself what you would do if you were not afraid and do that.

Be kind to yourself along the way - the path of not-fear is not always easy, especially at first. But after you’ve been on it for awhile, you may find it difficult to go back to living the other kind of life.

If that’s a scary thought for you, ponder these words of Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the president of Burma who has lived under house arrest for many years:

“Fear is a habit. I am not afraid.”

Some seriously good books to read about fear:

*BeliefWorks by Ray Dodd

*The Fear Book by Cheri Huber

*The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker

*Unleashing the Warrior Within by Richard J. Machowicz

*You Can Have What You Want by Michael Neill (UK edition)

©2006 Michael Neill All Rights Reserved