A Coaching Power Tool created by Nori Clements
(Women’s Lifestyles Coach, UNITED STATES)
Fear
Is there a fear you want to clear out of your life? Because fear and worry are part of the world, it doesn’t serve you towards living your most happy, purposeful best life. When you feed fear, you starve your peace of mind. Fear and worry are often accompanied by anxiety, confusion, and lack of hope; it does not hold any faith.
Fear takes on a many forms; it may come from something simple like being afraid of the dark to fear of economic security. The underlying similarity is the belief as humans, of our lack of control. We think that lack of control is our dilemma. In order to understand our fears we might begin by taking an accounting of a particular situation or a look at past behaviors and beliefs, we might make a list of these things, take inventory. Any situation, business or individual benefits from the occasional spot check inventory, and when we find a particular fear holding us back it may be the opportunity to take a look. Our fears can be bracketed alongside our difficulties. The word fear somehow touches about every aspect of our lives. There is a wonderful book written by Susan Jeffers, Ph.D., Feel the Fear…and Do it Anyway. She tells us that we will probably always have to deal with some kind of fear or worry. If we wait for these feelings to disappear before we start, we will never even begin.
You might try these things to start;
- Identify a time in your past when you worried.
- List what you worried might happen.
- Write down what actually did happen.
If you’re like most people, many of the negative outcomes you thought would happen, never did. And if they did happen, you survived. This leads to a final question of,
- Are you still alive to talk about it?
If you have overcome the worst-case scenario fear based result, regardless of how severe the fear, you have survived. If you have survived, you have overcome your worst result possible. A common acronym for fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear is false, because it is something that hasn’t happened yet. It is a feeling, and feelings are not factual, they just occur as a result of a thought.
If you want to get rid of a fear, face it head on with faith. Prove to yourself your faith is alive, by reminding yourself of factual past events where your fears never came to appear.
Remember, you have been divinely watched over to make it this far in your life, with and without all these obstacles you still survived.
Fear can’t survive where faith is alive.
Fear is frequently related to or highlighted by a behavior of avoidance. This type of fear almost always relates to future events, the unknown. In order to over come the fear and move through it we can ask ourselves specific questions about the particular situation.
- What are the fears that are keeping you from your goals?
- Assuming that your fears will never disappear, how long are you willing to wait to move forward?
- What is it to move towards the fear? Or lean into it?
Reflection
- What can you do to help your client to work through the fear and do it anyway?
- How can you help the client to walk through the discomfort of the difficulty/ fear?
Faith
Besides a seeming inability to accept much on faith, we might ourselves handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice. Many of us have been so touchy that even casual reference to spiritual things made us bristle with antagonism. This sort of thinking can be abandoned. Though some might resist this, we might find some have no great difficulty in casting aside such feelings. Faced with obstacles or destructive behaviors, we could be convinced, and willing to become open minded on such spiritual matters. In this respect our discomfort with any roadblocks or difficulties might become a catalyst and even our persuader towards faith. Faith can be trust in any type of information. In the case of religion, trust in religious information. Faith isn’t tangible…it’s abstract and subjective. Everyone has his or her own measuring sticks as to what information is credible and worthy of trust. Faith is obviously best placed in information that’s true and can be demonstrated. What can be accomplished then will be of much more value than faith placed in false information, based on opinions and conjecture. So, it leads to, ‘what is the most reliable information?’ Everyone has to sort that out for himself or herself. Not everyone agrees on the measure of truth. Faith is not only relative to religion. There is faith in almost everything we do and in the reasons why we do it. There is Faith when you decide to believe, act and expect something when it seems against your reason and all logical arguments. But it is also an act of Faith to follow reason as if it would be impossible for it to go wrong. When we choose to believe in something, when we decide to trust, when we do something but we really don’t know why we do it or why it is important, we gain faith and trust.
- We get information
- We believe that information
- We act on that information
For example;
You get a job; you will be hired to perform a certain function. You will earn a certain salary, you start work – payday comes – what guarantee do you have that you will be paid anything? It’s all on faith that your employer is credible and honest. Trust is a major issue in faith.
Coaching application: We use faith all the time
Think of when you were a child. Did you worry about where your next meal would be coming from? Stress out over having clothes to wear? Did you worry about what you even looked like? No. You lived in the present moment, and trusted the adults, your parents, were supplying the necessities you needed without even realizing you wanted them.
Faith is in general the persuasion of the mind that a certain statement is true. Its primary idea is trust. A thing is true, and therefore worthy of trust. Knowledge is also an essential element in all faith, and is sometimes spoken of as the same thing.
What do you need to do today – what action needs to take place in your life to make your Beliefs real?