Your Inner CEO: Fear From The Inside Out

Fear is a variation of anxiety that’s both easier and more difficult to handle. It’s easier than anxiety because the scenario is more obvious. Anxious people don’t know exactly what they’re worried about. Fearful people know all too well. 

There’s an old joke about a man who was continuously snapping his fingers. One day his friend asked him why he was always doing that. “Well,” said the man, with a note of fear creeping into his voice, “I do it to keep the elephants away.” His friend looked at him in disbelief: “But there are no elephants within a thousand miles.” “Yeah,” said the man, nervously snapping his fingers again. “It works great, doesn’t it?”

A man who’s afraid of elephants seems silly -- except to another man who’s afraid of elephants. To empathize with someone’s fear, don’t try to be afraid of the exact same thing. That almost never works, because fear is a very personal matter. 

Instead, think about something you’re afraid of -- or better yet, think about something that frightened you in the past. Maybe you were afraid of jumping into a swimming pool. Maybe it was getting on an airplane. Maybe you woke up one night and in the darkness you saw a monster on the other side of the room -- which was really your coat over the back of a chair. That's a key truth about fear. It’s almost always time-bound. Fears that seem very convincing at certain points in our lives look much less threatening later. In fact, they usually look pretty funny. But at the time they’re genuinely scary.

Use this exercise about past fears on yourself first. Then you can use it to help others with their own fears. Don’t try to convince the person that they’re wrong to be afraid.  That won’t work. Instead of talking about what they fear now, ask them about what they used to fear. 

Show them how fears lose their power once we get more information and perspective. Then ask them to project themselves forward in time -- and promise them that someday what’s frightening them now will seem as harmless as their fears in the past. This is an empathetic way of helping people with their fears. You’ll see how much better it works than lecturing somebody on one hand, or ignoring them on the other.