Fear Factor (3 min read)
Often as adults we forget about improving ourselves when we are grown up. When we were young as kids, we were often told to improve school work, improve our way of talking and improve ourselves. How do we improve ourselves?
At the work place, we are all too familiar with training like masterclass this course or masterclass that programme. In pre-Covid days, we had to join bootcamps or company retreats. Truth be told, I really dislike all these fake training programmes. Those trainers who were labelled "trainers" seem to be holding up a group of animals ransom and making them learn the new tricks of the day. The word, "trainer" is so inappropriate because in such training programmes, you deal with humans and not animals.
Do you think humans or animals are easy to be trained?
In what I see, animals are easy to trained. This is because humans have a mind of their own which is nowhere to be physically seen when the body undergoes a MRI scan.
Dealing with the human mind is just akin to dealing with the honest truth about UFOs. UFOs seem to exist and not exist. Sometimes the existence of UFOs are magnified
Mind magnifiers and illusions in the mind exist and work well with each other. Illusions in the mind are formless which can become harmful to the human. When we are faced with criticism and hate, our mind normally reacts to it rather than respond.
No one likes a critic especially if the criticism is directed to the self. Most times, we deal with it by dismissing or ignoring it. This will prevent us from learning about the different perspectives we can get with that criticism. If we think about it without reacting, the impact may not be negative. This is because when are faced with criticism, our self esteem is hurt. We think we have lost our social status as people do not like us anymore and we end up feeling shameful.
On the other end, there are some humans who desire to be praised all the time. There seems an obsession to hold on to the "positive fort" that allows them to stand high in good light. For a certain group of people, they say that they do not care about the haters and critics. In reality they mind.
For the above mentioned, the root cause is the fear factor. Why do we fear? This is because humans have a strong identity of themselves or an ego-centric self. Fear is also an acronym which means False Evidence Appearing Real. Our bodies are built to either fight or flight once we recognise or detect fear. Fear is also an illusion with magnifiers attached to it that throws us off balance from reality and makes us lose our clarity.
Let me tell you a story of a friend of mine who saw fear and dealt with it. When he was young, he had to make a decision one day to choose a short or long route home. The short route meant walking through a cemetery which took only ten minutes or the long route which was a round about that did not include the cemetery. To overcome his fear, my friend decided to conquer his fear and use the cemetery route. When I asked him if he experienced anything when he was walking through the cemetery, he just said yes.
He felt peaceful while through the cemetery. After that he felt powerful because he managed to overcome the fear factor and threw it out of the cemetery.
We can all learn from my friend's episode about de-magnifying effect in our mind and make that daily improvement as an adult.
“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” - Aristotle
OXOX
Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash
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