Embracing Fear by Thom Rutledge

Author:Thom Rutledge [Thom Rutledge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061741531
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Unique Just Like Everyone Else

What We Have in Common

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face…. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

FEAR TAKES MANY FORMS: dread, worry, panic, anxiety, self-consciousness, superstition, negativity. And it shows itself in many ways: avoidance, procrastination, judgment, control, agitation, perfectionism. These are just some of the guises of fear.

If negativity were an Olympic event, I would be from a family of gold medalists. I grew up with an ever present sense that no matter how successful I might be now, the next step was bound to be my doom. In elementary school, I was a straight-A student, but I would stay awake nights before a big test, literally becoming physically ill, because I was certain I was going to fail. My fear was not that I would make a B or even a C. And I didn’t think of it as a fear. I experienced it as a certainty: tomorrow the bottom would finally drop out, and I would fail.

In preparation for writing this book, I flipped through some of my old journals written over the past many years. Not surprisingly, it was not difficult to find a few entries about fear:

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