Managing Fear

We all live lives of endless possibility and most of us are free enough in someway to pursue an inexhaustible range of options in how we choose to live. When we honestly confront the knowledge that we live in a universe of unlimited choice it is common to experience significant levels of fear and anxiety. In response we often instinctively retreat to a more manageable scope of reality.

Sadly through this retreat we deny ourselves the experience of living fully and our gifts and abilities fail to fully blossom. When we react from fear we trade potential for perceived safety.

Albert Einstein understood our need to extend our thinking beyond self limiting beliefs when he wrote:

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Einstein in his wisdom shows us the way forward. Transcending fear and anxiety becomes possible when we shift our thinking beyond day-to-day life and grasp the whole that Einstein speaks of. This experience quickly teaches that we are not alone in our fear making it easier to safely open to possibilities beyond those that we normally imagine.

These are the behaviors that our families, communities, organizations, and the whole universe needs from us. Everything good that we ever wanted lives on the far side of our fears and in the words of Tom Petty “most of the things I fear never happen anyway”.