The number one barrier to the life you want is fear.
It isn’t a lack of knowledge, opportunity, health, wealth, or wellbeing.
It’s fear.
Fear tells you:
- keep everything under control
- be safe
- don’t be too vulnerable
- limit risk
- don’t dream
- don’t trust
- don’t get your hopes up
It stunts our ability to grow, lead, and impact the people around us.
And it’s very subtle.
It comes from past hurts and it waits beneath the surface for years.
We get hurt, then we isolate, then we hold onto the pain because it feels like something we deserved, and unknowingly, we feed fear.
But at the root of fear is something much sneakier – the need for control.
See, the fruit of fear is easy to spot:
- Anger
- Stress
- Worry
- Feelings of insignificance
- So on and so forth
Fear is the culprit behind all of these.
But you’ll notice that these pop up whenever things feel out of control.
Control feels safe, so we learn to chase it.
When we realize we can’t have it – because we can never truly have full control of anything in life – the body goes into fight or flight.
This is the essence of anxiety.
It’s caused by unthrottled and mismanaged thoughts about situations that are outside of our control.
When we have a painful experience, our minds try to protect us from that pain by trying to control potentially harmful situations in the future.
Of course, because we can’t control all potentially harmful situations, we eventually realize that control is an illusion, but our brains hate that conclusion because it feels unsafe.
So we search frantically for another solution to gain control.
And this is the cycle of fear.
What we do with the desire for control is what will determine whether or not fear grows inside of us.
We can do one of two things:
- Be willing to sit with the discomfort of what’s uncontrollable without trying to fix it (which is REALLY difficult)
- Run in circles chasing a solution until our brains go haywire with stress, anxiety, and panic
Unresolved pain will always lead us to option B.
It says, “this hurt, I don’t know why, but I can’t let it happen again, so I have to keep a tight grip to make sure it never does.”
This is why people say, “hurt people hurt people.”
A more accurate version of that would be, “unhealed people hurt people.”
Think about it:
A person with an open wound has to give control to a doctor to get healed.
If they didn’t and instead they went running around with a hand over the wound until it gets infected, that would lead them to anger, fear, and irrational behavior.
Holding onto control actually leads to the opposite of what they want.
But how do we learn to release control?
The only way to release control and overcome fear is to train your brain to see that it’s possible – and that you won’t die by doing so.
It’s pretty simple, yet very counter-intuitive:
Build a memory bank of the truth so your brain has more to work with when it’s trying to make judgment calls.
Memories are very strong sources of information for our brains.
The things that have happened to us throughout our lives shape what we expect from both the present and the future.
Our brains are very good at processing information, but because unpleasant experiences feel unsafe, they tend to hold onto bad memories more than good ones.
So here’s the key:
Try giving your brain more experiences of releasing control in little moments throughout your day, and start storing up positive outcomes (not all will be positive, so more reps are better).
Then recall that information regularly. Writing it down is particularly effective.
With a memory bank of positive outcomes, releasing control will feel less and less like a death sentence.
Instead, you’ll see that life and healing come shortly thereafter.