Dealing with Fear

“If you don’t attempt to get over your doubts and fears, you’ll never dis­cover how won­der­ful it is to live with­out them.“
– Colin McArty

“Of all base pas­sions, fear is the most accursed.“
– William Shakespeare

Beyond the unknown, you may have other kinds of pho­bias you will need to deal with. All fears, great or small, pro­hibit you from reach­ing your poten­tial because they cre­ate self-​​imposed lim­i­ta­tions. Since fear is gen­er­ally the prod­uct of a low self-​​esteem, the most effec­tive way to deal with your fears is to improve your self-​​esteem.

I’m sure there are count­less ways to improve your self-​​esteem; there is no “one” way of doing it. But the way I raised my own is by giv­ing my life a pur­pose. By giv­ing it a mean­ing rather than look­ing for one. More often than not, what enhances your self-​​esteem is pur­pose­ful­ness, for pur­pose grants you ammu­ni­tion (i.e., strength, courage, deter­mi­na­tion, per­sis­tence, faith, etc.).

When I grew up in a small town of Aylmer, Que­bec (Canada), I was abused by an alco­holic father and my child­hood was mostly spent locked inside my bed­room. I did so will­ingly in order to iso­late myself from the world and more so from my father. I was afraid of rejec­tion. It was debil­i­tat­ing. I feared it so much that I became a recluse in order to avoid it.

I was labeled as an ago­ra­pho­bic (i.e., a per­son who fears being with peo­ple or in pub­lic places) and always sought approval. Let me give you a brief his­tory so that you can under­stand why and, most impor­tant, how I fought my fears.

When I was born, I was a mam­moth of a baby weigh­ing close to 12 pounds. Being cramped inside my mother’s tiny womb — my mother is a petite woman mea­sur­ing only four feet tall — has caused me to be deformed at birth and my legs to have grown crookedly. After numer­ous vis­its to the hos­pi­tal and until the age of three, I had to wear cor­rec­tive braces to fix my mis­shapen legs and feet.

How­ever, I’ve been told that my father, a per­fec­tion­ist, was enor­mously trou­bled by my hand­i­cap. He resorted to drink­ing to deal with his emotions.

After my sister’s barely sur­vived birth five years later, my father’s alco­holism and men­tal health dete­ri­o­rated. He now suf­fers from a men­tal ill­ness called “Korsakov’s Disease.”

For­tu­nately, today he is under pro­fes­sional care where a series of med­ica­tions now man­age his emo­tions that have been aggra­vated by decades of alco­holism. Inci­den­tally, I have not seen my father since that time and was told not to do so, specif­i­cally because of his vio­lent nature.

Nev­er­the­less, regard­less of the fact that I was a straight “A” stu­dent, I was always told how much of a fail­ure or how stu­pid I was. Noth­ing I did was good enough for my father.

As a result, my grades slowly fell and I even­tu­ally dropped out of school. In spite of all that, I wanted to prove my father — and myself — wrong. I wanted to suc­ceed and, in order to do so, I had to elim­i­nate my fears.

To me, the fear of rejec­tion was a greater hand­i­cap than that of my phys­i­cal one because it rein­forced my father’s beliefs. As I grew older and wiser, I decided that I didn’t want to end up like my father and later made a pledge to myself that I would indeed suc­ceed. My father, there­fore, gave me a rea­son. A purpose.

It was the great­est gift I could ever have.

Today, as an author and pro­fes­sional speaker, I speak to large audi­ences at least once a week and run a very suc­cess­ful busi­ness. That is to say that my fears have com­pletely van­ished. Now, I’m not try­ing to get your sym­pa­thy or boast about my suc­cess. I don’t even con­sider my child­hood as “dys­func­tional” — whose child­hood is func­tional anyway?

The rea­son I’m telling you my story is to show you that the more con­sciously pur­pose­ful you become, the more ammu­ni­tion you find. Pur­pose­ful­ness, there­fore, increases your self-​​esteem, which in turn leads to fearlessness.

Inci­den­tally, there’s another true story that’s sim­i­lar to mine and you may have heard of it. It’s about two broth­ers whose father was an alco­holic. While one turned out to be an alco­holic, the other became a suc­cess­ful exec­u­tive. When they were each asked why they became that way, they both gave the same answer: “My father’s an alco­holic. What other choice did I have?”

All that you need to fight your fears or at least reduce that which stops you from reach­ing your poten­tial is right where you are. It’s your self-​​esteem. It doesn’t come from out­side of you and it’s not the result of pos­i­tive thinking.

Peo­ple who hear my story say that I was a pos­i­tive thinker, but a pos­i­tive men­tal atti­tude is not some­thing you can dic­tate or change on a whim. Pos­i­tive think­ing is merely a byprod­uct of pur­pose. If you live on pur­pose, you don’t need to think pos­i­tively. It just becomes a part of your life.

About the Author

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