Fear is something that affects our behaviours massively, even if we don't realise it. I know that my fear for certain things in life has caused me some serious issues and affected my behaviour and how I live my life. Now when I'm talking about fear here, I'm not talking about fears like being scared of spiders and heights, I'm talking about all of the little fears that we have that are related to how we are living our lives. Whether it be a fear of trying something new, or different, we all have these little nuggets in our minds that control how we live our lives.
As an example for this, I'm going to use one of my past experiences that were ruled by fear. In my previous relationship, I was so scared that my boyfriend would move on and find someone else that it changed the way I behaved and ultimately had a negative affect on our relationship. That fear made me become more insecure, more paranoid, and it changed the way I interacted with him a lot. It made me feel sad all the time, and the more I dug into that fear the worse it made me feel. I was stuck in an endless loop of feeling not good enough and that he would eventually find someone who was better than me. Looking back, what good did having that fear do? The answer is none, all it did was have a continuous negative impact on our relationship, drove us apart massively and made me into someone I'm not.
To quote an amazing woman named Lisa Nichols on fear "you are a story that I made up about the future that doesn't even really exist".
When I first heard that, it hit me quite hard. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I'm letting something control me and negatively affect me when it's literally something that I have made up in my mind about what's going to happen, that isn't even real. It may feel real in my mind, but it's not. Lisa also mentions how it's true to you, but only true to you, and because you think that's how it's going to turn out, you end up living that out and it then actually ends up happening. Reflecting on the example I mentioned earlier, this rings so true. Where I made myself believe that so much, it then affected my behaviour and then it technically ended up happening because of how I acted from it. Yeah, a part of me did look back at that situation and feel regret, but you need to push that aside and use that as a lesson, a mistake you know you won't make again in the future.
For me personally this was a big lesson, and it made me think about other aspects of my life where I've let fear rule me. Letting that happen, only actually makes the outcome worse. I realised that all these little fears that I've made up inside my head made me a different person and that the only person I could blame for things going wrong in my life were myself, because of my fear I'd made these things come true.
I'd highly suggest watching her video on fear which you can find HERE. It's inspiring in so many different ways and has completely changed my way of thinking. You can't let fear or negative emotions rule your life, because in doing so you're just going to cause yourself more pain. What I'd never realised before recently, was that I had been doing this to myself for years of my life. Now, my mindset has completely changed and it's made myself feel so much happier.
