Remember, fear doesn’t exist…

You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind. – Dale Carnegie

Shortened for Twitter to : “For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.”

What does that mean?
This basic truth has been said many times by many people through the ages. It is just the simple fact that fear is almost entirely mental. That’s not to say that fear is useless, it serves its purpose. But one shouldn’t consider fear to be the only scale on which to measure their actions.

Here, I take conquering fear to mean not the absence of fear, but the ability to do what needs to be done in spite of being fearful. This, to me, is the same as conquering an enemy, or overcoming an obstacle. The enemy still exists, the obstacle is still there, you have simply gone beyond needing to worry about these things. You have conquered them, not blasted them out of existence. Does that differentiation make sense?

Why is fear important?
Fear is that little something that lets us know that things are not going well. It is part of the fight-or-flight reflex that gives us that surge, giving us an edge for the next few moments.

Sometimes fear is a good thing. Without it, we might do really stupid, hurtful or even fatal things. How many jokes have someone saying “Hey, y’all! Watch this!”? As often as not, it’s their last words.

On the flip side, unreasoning fear is not a good thing. Being afraid of Tigers is a good thing if you live in an area where they roam. For most of us, Tigers aren’t that big of a worry. Being afraid of shadows or water or heights is one thing. But being afraid of them to the point where it impacts how you live your life is another thing entirely.

Where can I apply this in my life?
We have talked about fear and how to confront and overcome it before, but this time we will discuss it in terms of the intellectual exercise. The fear in your mind, why is it there?

Fear is a very primitive emotion, and it seems to be attached to all the very primitive and powerful responses. It is the fight-or-flight response, the emotional intensity, the almost completely irrational response to a tiny little spider, mouse, snake, bat or other little creature. If you’re like me, just reading the last sentence has you a little on edge, right?

Why? I’m not even afraid of any of those creatures. I like playing with daddy long legs spiders, I like mice, hamsters and gerbils (and have owned several as pets), have handled snakes of various kinds, and had a few encounters with bats. What is it that puts us on edge when discussing or even thinking of these creatures?

Some might say it’s some kind of racial memory, that humans fear other creatures that can cause them injury or which can attack undetected due to size, ability to hide or to find us when we can’t see them. Perhaps it’s just that writers have long known of our dislike and fear of certain creatures and worked them into scary stories for so long that it is a form of folk knowledge.

Spiders might have had a bad reputation before the story of “Little Miss Muffet“, but for most of us, that was probably our first experience with spiders. And they were creatures to be afraid of, right?

Movies have been no better, given everything from Dracula (bats), Willard (rats), Snakes on a Plane (snakes) and every other monster movie around. They play to, and reinforce our fears, ungrounded in actual physical experience (in most cases – walking into a spider web doesn’t count, that’s just creepy).

That is a big part of what make Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds” such a scary movie. The monster of the film was innocent little birds, the nicest little creatures you can think of. Fear of something so benign and normal, that was quite a shock to the psyche. You might expect to be frightened by attacking swarms of bats, rats, snakes or spiders, but birds?

It just reinforces the quote’s point that fear is in the mind, and that most fears can be overcome if you are determined to do so. There are allowances, of course, for fear caused by actual trauma, and for fears caused by chemical imbalances. For most of us, fear can be overcome, once we set our mind to the task and employ proper methods.

But first comes the decision to overcome that fear. That sounds scary, doesn’t it? You might have to decide to overcome the fear of overcoming your fear, first. But do it, there will still be some fear, but you can move past it, overcome it, and move on with your life, not completely fearless, but neither will you be completely fear-full.

From: Twitter, @DavidRoads
confirmed at : http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/dalecarneg378034.html