#4 Fear as Your Guide
Your pole star, your sign post
Don’t see fear as a stop sign. See it as a sign post. A pole star, a sparring partner.
That’s the essential idea behind FEARWARD. Instead of avoiding what we fear, we should move towards it. In this light, I try to notice fear and then reflect what it could lead me to, what it is pointing at.
I’ve meditated on this idea a few weeks ago and thought about concise ways to describe it and keep it in mind as a mantra. I’ve then also written about that and my aim to focus on the virtue of courage this year in my first public post in the Heroic app and mentioned that in a post here before.
Repetition for what we want to learn an practice is crucial. Repeatingg, rehearsing, meditating on what we want to practice, over and over again. Just as Marcus Aurelius did with Stoic principles. So, here we go again:
Fear/Discomfort/Pain as a pole star, a sign post, a sparring partner.
We know that growth happens outside of our comfort zone. Thus, we must seek what brings us outside of our comfort zone. We'll probably get there when we look where our fears and anxieties point at, what they try to make us avoid. What they want to make us ignore or tell ourselves it isn't important after all or worth it.
But it is important. It is worth trying. And we know that.
Not acting, avoiding, being lazy is just more comfortable in the moment.
Ryan Holiday also brought this idea up in Courage is Calling, where he writes:
“Our fears point us, like a self-indicting arrow, in the direction of the right thing to do. One part of us knows what we ought to do, but the other part reminds us of the inevitable consequences. Fear alerts us to danger, but also to opportunity. If it wasn’t scary, everyone would do it. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be any growth in it.” - Ryan Holiday in Courage is Calling (p. 65)
And Tim Ferris said in his 2008 TED talk:
“Fear is an indicator. Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn’t do. More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. And the best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: What’s the worst that can happen?” - Tim Ferris, TED talk
This is to walking towards where the signs and arrows of fear are pointing at.