5 Clever Tricks to Help You Overcome The Things You’re Afraid Of

Psychological tips to boost your courage…

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” — Les Brown

Everyone has things they’re afraid of but it can really stop you from doing new things, having new opportunities and experiencing personal growth.

It’s important to know that there is always something you can do to help tackle these fears.

As someone who is training to be a clinical psychologist, there are a several clever tricks that you can implement to help you overcome the things you're afraid of to help you achieve better personal growth. Here are five clever tricks to help you do just that.

1. Regain Control Over The Things You’re Afraid Of

When you’re afraid of something, it often controls you.

For example, if you fear flying, you most likely won’t get on a plane to another country stopping you from experiencing the world.

However, if we learn how to take control over the things we’re afraid of, we regain power.

A way to do this is by developing personalised statements/affirmations to help you regain power and control over your fear. For example, if you have a fear of publishing your writing online for people to read, you can come up with your own affirmations to help. You might say:

I’m not writing for everyone to like my writing. I’m writing to share my thoughts, experiences and get things off my chest.

2. Take it One Step at a Time

When we’re afraid of something, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by it. We start to look at all the things that can go wrong. For example:

If you have a fear of speaking in front of people, you might think, “I’m going to do a terrible job, I’ll mess this up, people will laugh at me, I’ll freeze,” and the list continues.

This catastrophisation is what stops you from tackling your fear. It makes you feel more worried and anxious.

An easy psychological trick to stop yourself from doing this and tackle your fear is to take one step at a time. Just think about what you can do right now to help address your fear.

For example, if you fear publishing your work online, can you show it to one person to begin with? That could be your small step.

So, take things one step at a time and the rest will come.

3. Directly Test Your Fearful Predictions

As a trainee clinical psychologist seeing people daily for anxiety difficulties, a common theme that occurs is people have negative predictions of what might happen. And they completely believe this negative prediction to occur 100% of the time.

The reality is, they don’t actually test the prediction because the fear of it drives them away.

That’s where I enter. Through support, I help encourage them to test their fearful predictions in the real world and see if what they thought would happen actually happens.

In most cases, it doesn't and this leads to a beautiful increase in personal growth and learning. It helps break down their fear.

So, to help overcome your fear, right down your negative prediction. Then figure out a way to test it in the real world. See what happens.

Often your prediction may not come true and instead can help you break down the fear. A good tip is to have someone you trust close to you help you test this negative prediction.

“Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.” — Dale Carnegie

4. Improve The Belief in Your Ability

It’s simple — if you don’t completely believe you can do something, the chances of doing it are close to zero. This is what happens when we face something we’re afraid of.

Instead, if you work on improving your belief in your ability to tackle the fear, chances are you’ll be able to overcome it. To do this:

• Observe others and see them put the effort in and succeed at something. Research supports this too. So if it’s with your writing, look at the writing of people you look up to. If they have tips on how they write so frequently, look at the tips and copy them.
• Remind yourself of when you’ve achieved goals. A study published in 2016 found that the greatest variable that increased teachers’ belief in their ability was personal experiences of success. If you look at the times you’ve succeeded or done something, the belief in your ability in the present moment will increase too.

5. Challenge Your Negative Thoughts

Again, when fearful of things, negative thoughts creep into our minds. These thoughts make us even more afraid.

A common thinking style that occurs when afraid is emotional reasoning. This means we believe our emotions to be facts. For example, if a problem is faced, we can feel helpless if we don’t know how to solve it initially, therefore we start to believe we are helpless.

A good way to challenge this is to ask yourself “what evidence do I actually have for these thoughts?”

For example, you can challenge emotional reasoning by saying to yourself “well, I’ve solved problems before, so that doesn’t mean I am helpless.”

So, when a problem is faced, work on regaining control over your thoughts. This can help ground yourself, making it easier to tackle your fear.

Final Comments

There’s nothing bad about having fears. We all do. But often we feel left in the dark and think there is nothing we can do to address the things we’re afraid of or we start to let our fears control us.

However, keep these five psychological tricks in mind to help you tackle the things you’re afraid of:

• Regain control over your fear.
• Take it one step at a time.
• Directly test your fearful predictions.
• Improve the belief in your ability.
• Challenge the negative thoughts.

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