Overcoming Irrational Fears

Welcome to A New Life podcast with Pamela Jean, where it's all about empowering women to empower more women. Get ready, friends, to create a new life. And here is your host, Pamela Jean.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to this week's episode of A New Life podcast. I'm Pamela Jean, your host. Thank you so. Thank you so much for being here. Today's topic is how to deal with fear or irrational fear. When I coach people, everyone has something that they're afraid of. And some people's level of fear is different than others. Some are very kind of irrational, if I'm being honest. It's irrational fear. Fear that just doesn't make sense now. It doesn't make sense from a logical standpoint, but when you're talking to the individual, it's very real and very emotionally attached fear. And that makes total sense. You know, something that I might be afraid of isn't going to be the same thing as someone else. So understanding that the fears that you have can be as unique as you are, but not addressing these fears is really impacting the quality of your life. Sometimes fears will completely, completely take control. And we will not allow ourselves to enjoy life because of our fears. So before we get started, I'm just going to ask you to do me a favor. Will you please subscribe to this podcast? Pamela Jean and New Life. I'm so glad you're here. I really do appreciate your spending your time with me, but subscribe and share this podcast with friends. Do you know of someone who deals with irrational fear or fear in general? Let them know that this is a good resource for them to get on a pathway of creating a new life for themselves. Okay, so we're going to dig in. If you are someone who is in the grip of paralyzing fear, one of the first steps is identifying and acknowledging the fear. Now, sometimes our emotions get in the way because our emotions are going to dictate our actions. Our actions end up giving us our results. But if you could recognize what your fear is and admit to yourself that the fear might be irrational or just not as big of a deal as what you're making it out to be in your own mind and just understand that it may not have a logical basis or it just simply may be exaggerated. There's a saying that I really think is so true that the dread of something is worse than the do than actually doing it. So if you're dreading something, fearing place fear in that. If you're dreading doing something, think about all the reasons why, why Are you fearful of something? What has you afraid? Are you afraid of embarrassment? Are you afraid of feeling? What are you afraid of? If you can identify what you're dreading and then you just do it, you'll understand that the do is easier. The dread was worse than the do. So think about what are the things that you're afraid of and then analyze the fear. Try to understand where it came from. Is it based on experience? Have you just been misinformed or educated? Your education around a certain thing was irrational. Knowing the source of your fear will help you work through it. Now there are some fears that they're pretty deep rooted and you may need some professional help to work through the fears. For instance, here's one that's going to cut to the core for some of you, that if you were abandoned as a child, you were put into foster care as a first grader or a five year old, the chances of you fearing abandonment are pretty high right now as an adult because of something that happened to you when you were a child. So if you can start to understand where the fear comes from, the fear of being laughed at, the fear of being embarrassed, if you can think about where that comes from, that's a really good step in understanding the power that it holds over you today. One of the things that you can do is create a little bit of a strategy and start questioning how real the fear is, the validity of the fear. Ask yourself, is there concrete evidence to support this or am I becoming a toxic overthinker? Because often irrational fears are based on assumptions and irrational thinking and assumptions are things that are a lot of times we've thought of, we've made them up in our brain. We have conjured up these assumptions in our own brain and then we're like, well, that's true, that's just the way it is. Because that's what my brain is telling me. Well, our brain isn't always telling us what we need to be told. So think about a process of if you are facing something that you're afraid of, something that you fear, get out your journal. I hope you have that journal handy with you all the time. And start writing down the fear and write down what you think, where do you think the fear came from? And then start writing down logically, not with your emotional brain, but with your logical brain, if there really is evidence to support this thing to be afraid of. Now educate yourself, that's the next step. Start educating yourself and seek out knowledge on your topic of fear. Knowledge can dispel and eradicate those irrational fears and consult reliable sources. Don't just go to sources that you know are going to feed into your fear, but consult reliable sources. Whether it be an expert or you know, whatever, consult reliable sources. If your fear is related to a specific situation, I want you to gradually, in a comfortable way, start to expose your fear. Take small steps to confront your fear and over time you will become more comfortable. The longer you hide behind your fear, the more power the fear is going to have over you, the more control the fear will have over you. So it's important to slowly and gradually expose your fear. And you know what? No one outside of yourself has to know that you're even doing that. But it's growth and work that you'll need to do within yourself, being really mindful and practical about your fear. You know, be mindful and confront it and you don't have to talk yourself out of it, but you do have to put yourself in a logical, healthy thought space to be able to start working through that fear. Sometimes meditation, prayer, yoga, deep breathing can help calm your fears. If you are in a place where your fear has become paralyzing, please don't make any decisions, any big life decisions when you're in that place. Allow yourself that time to meditate and pray and work through the fear to where you can get it to a rational space before you make any big life decisions. And I think I mentioned this earlier, but I think it should just be said again. If the fear is so gripping and so paralyzing, please seek professional help. I'm a life coach, business coach. Reach out to me. I will help you with that as best I can. If what you need is more than what I can provide, I will be the first person to let you know that. I never want to waste your time and misguide anyone. Seek support. Seek support for your friends from your friends and your family. Talking to loved ones about your fears can really provide some good emotional support and they can give you some good advice during some of those really, really tricky times and present you with a new perspective, a new way of thinking. It's important to seek help when we need help and how we talk to ourselves. Friends, can we just be real? You've got to challenge your negative self talk and replace it with positive affirmations. You've got to remind yourself every single day of what your strengths are and work on the things from the past that have a grip on you, that are holding on tightly and overcome those things from the past. Your past is not who you are today. Your Past created you, it impacted you, it influenced you. But you are not your past. If you did something in the past that you're not proud of, and now you're afraid that someone, people, the rest of the world might find out you are not who you were in the past. Your past does not define who you are today. It helped make you who you are today, but it doesn't define who you are. It doesn't define who you are. So seek some, some support from friends, family, have some positive self talk. You've got to, you've got to work on the relationship that you have with yourself to be able to overcome the negative posture that you may have when it comes to overcoming your fears. Visualizing success, I've talked to you about that before in past podcasts, is you have to visualize success. Visualize yourself confidently dealing with that situation that triggers your fear. Visualize yourself retraining your brain to think and react differently in the face of fear. One of my favorite things to teach in my coaching is a mindset model. And the mindset model is so powerful, if you do it, it's so powerful. While coaching with me, I will have you work on mindset model 30 minutes every single day until you retrain how you think. It's so important. Your thought process and pattern today has come from past experiences, past influences, and past trauma events, whatever. It's all been indoctrinated into you. You might be thinking a certain way about something you're afraid of because of an experience that happened 20, 30 years ago when you were a child. You can change those events. You can change how you think about the thing that still is gripping your thought process today. And I use a mindset model that I absolutely love. And we start with that circumstance. The circumstance is the thing that's out of your control. That it is a fact that you do not have the control or the power to change the outcome of that particular circumstance. After the circumstance will trigger a thought. What you think about the circumstance creates your emotion, how you feel about it, your emotion that's connected to that circumstance. Your emotion dictates your actions, what you do, your actions create your results. If you are not getting the results that you desire in your life because you allow fear of certain circumstances to be more powerful than what you think about them, you will always struggle. But if you put that circumstance, that fear, maybe here's your circumstance to give you a worldview. Maybe your circumstance is you have a fear of driving up over a bridge where there's water on both sides. You have A fear of that. Okay, how do you overcome that? You overcome that by what you think your circumstance is. I have a fear, and this is a fact. I am afraid to drive over the bridge. I have fear. Your circumstance tells you. What do you think about that circumstance? What do you think about that fear of going over the bridge? Well, your thought is, I could drive off the bridge and die. Okay, there's one thought. Or you could say, I am going to overcome this fear by practice. I'm going to overcome it by practice. So maybe emotionally that gets you a little bit excited. You're a little bit excited. Hopeful. You're hopeful that I'm going to get over the fear of driving over the bridge? By practice. By practicing. So if hopeful is your emotion, your action, what is your action going to be? Your action is going to be a logical process of getting over that fear. Where are you going to drive? You know, practice driving over the bridge at rush hour. No, you'll practice driving over the bridge at the quietest time of day where there's not much traffic during the day, where there's light traffic, you're not going to be going over with semis or lots and lots of rushing cars. And you practice. That's your action. And then your result, your result is, wow, that wasn't so bad. Okay, I'm going to try again tomorrow. So you do it again tomorrow. Every time you do that action, that process with that result of everything is okay, you're going to build confidence and slowly overcome that fear. In the process, you have retrained your brain to start thinking differently about what you're afraid of. Now, friends, this is a process. This is not something that is going to happen overnight. My goodness. It's going to take dedication and perseverance and work, and you will have to work on this process. But the mindset model of retraining your brain is one of the best gifts you can give yourself. Because without it, you will always stay stuck. And you will allow those fears to overcome you and to have power and control. The last thing I want to talk about is for you to be patient with yourself. You know, when it comes to our children, not always, but most times, we're pretty patient with them. You know, they make mistakes and we might need to reprimand them, we might need to teach them, but we love on them and we give them another shot and another shot and another shot. If it takes them 10 times, 20 times, 100 times, we're still going to love our children unconditionally. Friend, you need to Learn to love yourself unconditionally. To love yourself unconditionally. And be patient with yourself that you know what, you didn't quite make it this time, but you're going to get it next time. You're going to get it next time. And I love you. Just like you would love your children when they are learning something new or overcoming their own fears. Be patient with yourself. Overcoming fears is a process that does take time. Don't be too hard on yourself while you're working on this and expect to experience setbacks. You're going to have them. It's going to be there. So if you have the expectation of, yes, I'm going to experience a setback, but know it's going to be okay, it's okay to have a setback, expect them, and believe that setbacks are setups for something better and bigger and brighter. Persistence truly, truly is key. And giving yourself that patience and grace to learn and grow, even if you're an adult right now trying to overcome something from a really long time ago, persistence is key. That's the only way. It's the only way. And remember that everyone that you meet has fears and expect them to experience them occasionally. It's how they manage life. It's how you manage life. But when you manage your life with the fears and overcome them, you will gain so much control over those irrational fears which will lead to a more fulfilling life, creating the life for yourself that you've always dreamed of. Because, my friend, you're worth it and you deserve it. Thank you, friend. Thank you so much. I love doing podcasts. I love writing them. I love coaching you through these different things in life and I hope that you find this beneficial. Please share this with your friends. I want to build this positive, incredible community of women supporting women, people supporting people. The more we raise everyone up, the better it is for everyone involved. So, friends, pass this along to whoever you think could benefit from this. If you want more coaching, I'm here for that too. Reach out to me, Pamela Jean a new life gmail.com and I would love to talk to you. Schedule a virtual coffee and we'll just chat. Figure out what you might want and what you might need out of a coach and I can let you know if I can help you, if I am the right coach for you, and if I'm not, I will absolutely pass you on to someone who is. Because it's important to me that through coaching that it benefits you, it helps you, it serves you. Otherwise, I'm not doing my job all right, my friend, thank you again so much for joining me. Make it a great day and I'll talk to you next time.

Thank you for joining us today on a New Life podcast. We will see you next time.

Sam.