Hunting Fear

I read this short little ebook that offered some tips on how to handle that uncomfortable feeling you get when you're about to do something unusual. It's the feeling that prevented me from approaching girls in high school. The Flinch, what the author of the ebook labels the physiological response to the psychological anticipation of physical or emotional discomfort, should  be taken as a sign that you're about to do something meaningful and significant. Push through it, we're urged. Once you've talked to that girl you'll see that there really wasn't a good reason to be scared. The ebook offers a number of suggestions to arouse The Flinch so you can start building up a tolerance to it's influence. Follow their plan and you'll start flinching into challenges rather than away from them.

Don't follow this advice. Rather than forcing yourself to simply push through your instinctive fear, embrace the discomfort of activities that fall outside of your status quo. Plunge into the rationalizations you automatically generate when you want to stop running before you reach your target. Those feelings are nothing more than a threat response. You can't identify the threat, or at least identify what some part of you perceives as a threat, if you simply charge ahead.

Instincts bubble up into our awareness from the deep recesses of our mind. They are defensive automatic responses generated well outside of our awareness. Don't waste an opportunity to delve into your darkest fears by simply pushing past The Flinch. Stop, look around. Get the thinking part of your brain to take in every detail of the situation. Why do you feel threatened? What outcome would make the pain you're anticipating a reality? Simply taking that step will probably prevent that outcome by short circuiting whatever deleterious automatic response you would have in that situation.

A pheasant hunter doesn't cower when a bird bursts out of the grass. He calmly assesses the situation and shots the bird. We can't hunt down our instinctive fears if we run around the field getting birds to take flight. If we don't kill them, they'll just go back to their hiding place. Instinctive fears built up to protect a fragile ego deserve to be destroyed. Don't miss an opportunity to take one down so you can mount it as a trophy.