What Fear Can Teach Us

Everyone of us has our own set of fears, but how we look at these fears - whether as our enemies or our teachers - will significantly impact the outcome of our lives.

This video talks about a fresh view that we can adopt in facing our fears.

 

Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us

Here are some key quotes I have taken from the video:

We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure do we spend enough time thinking about what our fear means?

As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth and roller skates.

Neuroscientists have actually shown that humans are hardwired to be optimists. So maybe that's why we think of fear sometimes as a danger in or itself..."don't worry" we like to say to one another, or "don't panic".

In English, fear is something we conquer, something we fight, something we overcome. But what if we look at it in a fresh way, what if we thought of fear as an amazing act of imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful like story-telling itself. 

What if instead of calling them fears, we call them stories, because that's really what fear is if you think about it. It's a kind of unintentional story-telling that we are all born knowing how to do.

Fear and story-telling have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have characters, and in our fears the characters are ourselves.

Fears also have plots. They have beginnings, middles and ends: you board a plane, the plane takes off, the engine fails.

Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as we can find in pages of a novel: picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over fire.

Fears also have suspense. Just like every great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature - what will happen next. In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And humans are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in terms of time. And this mental time travelling is one more thing fears have in common with story-telling.

If we think of our fears as more than just fears but stories, we should think of ourselves as the author of those stories. But just as important, we should also think of ourselves as the readers of our fears. And how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.

Embrace and read your fears.