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Fear vs Personal Power

Ken about to go Hang gliding for the first time, Puerto Rico

When I was growing up in my little home town about 20 miles west of Boston, I grew up thinking that everything inside Rte 128 (the ring road about 10 miles outside of the city) was filled with skyscrapers and people with knives. My mother was very scared of the city and she instilled that fear in us. We could go in occasionally, but it always felt like we were ready for an attack at any moment. The real revelation to me was when my sister and I started to go into a dance group at MIT weekly, meet different people who lived there (and many who had lived in different places around the world) and we got to see that it wasn’t a more dangerous place than our little town, but just one with more and different people.

That emboldened me to spread my wings a lot more. I went to college in Upstate New York (it was always expected that I would go to a state school), worked for a summer in Germany, and lived in Taiwan for a year studying Mandarin Chinese and teaching English. I definitely got over that fear in my life to go and try different places.

There have been other parts of my life that I’ve been recently seeing that I have the same sort of fear. Can I be truly and fully me and have people accept me? Can I be bold in stating what I want? Can I move forward with things when I dint know what the future will hold?  These questions have many times stopped me from doing things, contemplating things, or trying things out.

I see thus a lot with my clients in that they want to change their lives bit there is some fear that is just keeping them frozen. The worst part about it usually is that they don’t know they are in fear. Fear seems to be stealth and show up when we don’t realize it.

If you are acting our of fear, you are not in touch with your own personal power, and then you will always react to others’ stimuli instead of working toward your own goals.

So, what are you afraid of, and what is it keeping you from doing? Are you practicing being afraid, or practicing being powerful?

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3 Comments

  1. Margaret

    Ken, I wish I’d read this about 30 years ago. I only figured out I should live as fearlessly as possible in the last few years. It’s difficult to put into practice, sometimes very difficult, but my live has just kept on improving since I decided that fear and acting from fear and trying to avoid scary things was destructive. I lost a lot of time. Not gonna lose another day to fear.

  2. Margaret

    Decisions made from fear are usually decisions made to avoid things. Which leaves life looking something like a pinball, careening off in all directions to avoid fears and never going where one wants to go. Huge waste of time, energy, and direction.

    A lot of times, it isn’t even power (as in who has the power, our fears, or us?), but rather by agreeing to live fearlessly and feel the genuine pull of our own real desires and needs and directionality, we get to be more and more our own selves with each step. Maybe that’s power, power isn’t a language I tend to speak. But it is certainly self possession.

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