Hello folks and welcome back!

Apologies for the long absence, I have been spending time working on my novel this year which I am pleased to say I have just finished and hope will be able to share with you in the future!

But for now, it’s good to be back.

I have been contemplating an interesting concept that came up during my time of research for my counselling course this week.

There is such a thing as an ‘Empathy Scale’, which lists good, empathic skills and qualities to practice when helping someone though a difficult issue.

At level 5 – the ‘highest’ empathic level, it states that in order to be a good helper, you need to be able to show warmth and tenderness. That I can do! Next on the list was good listening. Yes, that sounds achievable. Check! Check! I feel I’m doing well here so far.

However, the next personal quality on the list was to ‘be fearless’.

Ah.

Fear is an emotion that the vast majority of us experience. With our uniqueness and individual frames of reference, we may have different triggers or similar triggers resulting in feelings at greater or lesser degrees, but we haven’t seemed to evolved into a state as humans of not feeling it at all, ever.

I expect the Empathy Scale was specifically talking about the need to be fearless in a particular scenario but it got me thinking about what it would actually be like to be fearless in life.

Of course, we need fear in certain circumstances as actually, it keeps us safe. It means we don’t get squashed on our way to work, or leave knives lying around when we have small children or decide one day that we will attempt to swim the channel with no training etc.

But I am talking about being fearless when it comes to personal objectives and growth.

My initial reaction was that it would be very helpful! Not letting it get in the way of life’s challenges and hard decisions; not experiencing any scenario the thought of which makes my legs quiver, my palms sweaty and me wanting to throw up. Basically, getting to the point of evolving into a version of myself that never felt fear and was pretty much super-human!

But is that really possible in this day and age? We live in an era where our little portable computer flashes daily to alert us to the reports of entire world’s troubles before we have even woken up to face the day. Bleary eyed and half asleep, there it is, the world’s threats, worries and woes to mull over with our morning cappuccino. Having digested all of that, as well as our own up close and personal troubles who can say they don’t feel the fear?

My approach has been very practical in this regard lately as I seem to have a highly sensitive reaction to ‘bad’ things; news, certain comments, feedback etc. So, I have made decisions based on that self-awareness such as; don’t watch the news, don’t doom scroll, even get rid of the Fitbit (yes folks, any teeny drop in my HRV or SP02 levels and I panicked). But thinking about it, isn’t cutting all of that out making myself a bit, well, oblivious?

Courage, in contrast to fearlessness, is different.

It doesn’t require you not to feel or to supress your emotions. Courage asks you to boldly walk up to them, embrace them and then, basically tell them to ‘do one’. It asks you to summon up something inside you that wants to be greater than the fear, the desire to overcome and to conquer.

Mark Twain said that ‘courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear’ and Nelson Mandela said ‘The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear’.

But what can we draw on in order to conquer these fears?

It might be faith, it might be mindfulness, it might be practice. It might be all three. But for those of us who do ‘feel the fear’ it is encouraging to know that it can be overcome and that as we push through the challenges that we are finding hard in life, there is the reward of increased strength and bravery on the other side.

So, today, if fear is stopping you from doing something positive in your life, as the author and speaker Susan Jeffers says; “Feel the fear, and do it anyway’. Your future self will thank you for it.