fear

Letters to my younger, academically-challenged, and chronically insecure self.

On Unfriending Inferiority and Fear

You will often find that your deepest hardship and pain will fuel your greatest gifting.  At times, you will want to curl up in a ball and disappear.  You may even wonder what life would be like if you were strong enough to believe that ‘what it takes’ lives inside of you. When you realize that you are strong and that you do have ‘it,’ things will get a little easier.  This letter is to help you on your way to that place.

It has been said that “in every adversity there is the seed to an equivalent advantage”  (quote) and this is definitely true. Your struggles to read and understand things others find “intuitive” will feel like an infirmity worsened only by the sense that there is no one in the universe struggling the way you are.  As an antidote for this sense of inferiority, I offer five points of encouragement:

1. Never Compare Yourself

  You must vehemently resist the urge to compare yourself to others.  Absolutely everyone falls victim to this tendency sometimes, with the result of either feeling better about themselves or feeling worse.  

  At one extreme, comparing yourself to others in self-congratulation is a sinister trap.  It will deceive you into thinking you’ve arrived at the summit when you’ve only made it to the rest-stop halfway up the mountain.  People caught in this trap don’t push themselves to develop or improve, satisfied in thinking they’re doing better than most.

Comparisonitis Cuts Both Ways  

At the other end of the Comparisonitis Spectrum is the trap that causes people to believe they are losers or failures.  You are most vulnerable to this.  This evil will cause you to compare your worst feeling or opinion of yourself, with others’ best performance.  Remember that exactly the same war that’s going on inside your head is happening inside everyone else’s. 

Left unchecked, a constant drip of self-criticism will poison your view of yourself and stunt your growth.  Combat this by repeating the vision and promises that have been spoken over your life and that resonate with your purpose.  This will build your faith and confidence and renew your mind.  Failure to do this will cause you to see those around you as giants and yourself a grasshopper.  You will find yourself looking around in dismay, forlorn and intimidated as the people around you seem to advance in life with ease.  Those who do advance have only succeeded in shutting down the noise in their head.  This isn’t easy.  But you must make it your priority.

2.     Know Your Worth

To escape the tendency to be intimidated by others’ “genius”, you must know and value your own.  As Albert Einstein put it, “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”   

  Know that many well-respected CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, and effective community leaders have overcome challenges far greater than yours.   They aren’t bothered by the fact that we can’t all be good at everything.  Their success was borne of a blend of resilience and creativity that helped them work through great academic and professional failure.  The pain of their childhood only fueled their success.

Hard as it may be to believe, there are things you do with ease that many others might find hard.  

Yes, You are a Genius Too!

Are you the person who tends to pick up on things others tend not to see?  Do you have an innate ability to assess a situation, diffusing tension and misunderstanding through your humor and emotional intelligence?  Are you the one who goes the extra mile to ensure the people who are often overlooked and under-appreciated are seen and applauded?  Are you a great listener?  Do you understand people’s pain?  Are you a great mentor and counselor?  

These are valuable qualities.  Never forget that, even if you find yourself surrounded by people who don’t appreciate them.  

  Understand that, while humility has great value, self-deprecation (putting yourself down) has absolutely no place in your thought-life or the words that come out of your mouth.  It is possible to be humble and confident at the same time.  You must work hard to be both.  

Honor those around you and serve them fervently.  But make a point to know your gifts and talents and always celebrate them without apology.

3. Fear is Not Your Friend

Fear will often masquerade as wisdom to hinder you.  When you think you are choosing wisdom, it will often be fear that sits at the table to counsel.  You must develop the ability to discern the difference.  Wisdom is your friend.  Fear is not.  

To build strength and do hard things with ease, you are going to have to take calculated risk.  You must respond to fear quickly.  When you do that, you will starve it of its primary sources of nutrition: time and excuses, both of which fuel great unproductivity in most people’s lives.  You must seize the opportunity of a lifetime within the lifetime of the opportunity.  If you pause at all, do so only to contemplate how you would feel at the end of your life when thoughts about your failure to act flood your mind.  Let the only fear to which you respond be the fear of that regret. 

Of course, this absolutely does NOT apply to situations involving physical safety.  In those circumstances, it’s usually best to run away from the (head)light at the end of the tunnel, instead of towards it.

  Just remember that courage is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to continue a course of action in spite of it.  Whatever you know to do, hurry up and do it, because the torment you experience will only increase with the time you waste agonizing over it.  In short, although fear will be a familiar companion in your life (you are not alone in this) never let anxiety tell you what to do.

4.     Fear opens doors to the negative

You will hear it said that “fear is faith for the things you don’t want,” because it opens doors to the negative, attracting it to you.  As Job of the Old Testament once said, “The very thing I feared the most has come upon me.”  This is definitely true.  

When it comes to choices relating to your purpose and destiny, if anything, the thing you fear is to be food for you.  Let it be your fuel and your guide.  Think of it as a scarecrow that has been strategically placed in the middle of a field to scare away the birds.  The only purpose of the scarecrow is to protect the harvest.  In many circumstances, i there weren’t so much at stake, and the voice of fear wouldn’t be so loud.  Always seek wise counsel regarding your purpose.  But having done so, when you sense fear, run towards it with the expectation of a soon-to-be-harnessed promise.  

You will be afraid that people will laugh at you.  Let them laugh.  They are quietly wondering what their lives might be like if they had your courage.  It is a sad reality that most people never fulfill their destiny because fear is more real to them than reality.

5. Fear closes doors to opportunity

The ability to respond affirmatively to fear is like a muscle that develops when you force yourself outside of your comfort zone.  Do this as often as possible.  

You will hear it said that people often unwittingly reduce their lives based on the things they are afraid of.  For example, someone with a fear of flying might go to great lengths to ensure they never have to board a plane to travel.  As a consequence, they live their life never feeling fear.  But that is simply because they have reduced their life to accommodate it.  They may think they are living “free” from fear, but that’s only because their entire existence is based on the subconscious goal of leaning away from the things they fear instead of leaning in to engage them.  

This is an easy trap that many respectable and even highly accomplished people fall into.  The live safe lives completely void of courage because they couldn’t face themselves if they failed or found something hard.  But now you know.  Just as fear opens doors to the negative in your life, it also closes doors of opportunity that you would have wanted to stay open had you known what was on the other side.