Courage: Overcoming Fear and Igniting Self-Confidence (4 page)

THE INFLUENCE OF FEAR

Fear is a very real emotion that can render us powerless. Much of our power is to be found in the choices we make and the actions we take, with every choice either leading us down the same familiar path or propelling us toward a new future. Without warning, fear can take over.

There is so much turmoil in our hearts and in our heads that it is easy to lose sight of what’s truly important to us. We are influenced by the myriad events in our lives—both the joyous and grace-filled events and those that blindside us and leave us hurt, angry, sad, or grief ridden. Every day we make choices and are confronted with different possibilities that shape our future. We often treat these choices as if they mean nothing, as if there will be no consequences, or if there are, we will deal with them later—tomorrow, next week, or whenever. But these day-to-day choices either whittle away at our self-esteem and confidence or add to our character, making us feel stronger and more alive. Our ability to cut through fear and to act with courage is determined by whether our choices are made from thoughtfulness and planning or while we are on automatic pilot (a nonthinking or nonfeeling state that drives us to repeat old patterns).

If you grew up without a strong sense of self, you second-guessed yourself constantly. Confused by the internal, doubt-filled chatter, you most likely shrank in the face of adversity, hid when you needed to be seen, and kept your mouth shut when your voice needed to be heard. Fear will have you choose what you believe will keep you safe even when the opposite is true. It will have you believe that you can’t do it, you are wrong, the cost is too high, the path ahead too difficult. Fear will tell you, “Don’t even think about it. Stay where you are. It’s just not the right time to deal with this.” But these are the kinds of lies that keep fear in power and you at a standstill. These are the lies that breed mediocrity and guarantee you an unfulfilled life. These are the lies that you must confront if you are going to bypass a predictable future and leap into an unpredictable yet infinitely beautiful future.

With great persuasiveness, fear disguises itself with the Voice of Uncertainty, filling you with worry, doubt, and even dread. With its continuous haranguing, it undermines you with a loop of self-criticism. Its dubious power comes from convincing you to turn away from your highest truth and succumb to the pain of the past. Every time fear wins, you lose. Every time you choose fear, you lose sight of your highest aspirations. You fall prey to being controlled by your history rather than rising to the future that you desire and deserve. Fear screams out, “Don’t let go! Don’t give up your grudges, your anger, your grief, or your excuses!” Fear taunts you, telling you that you will surely fail. It happily reminds you of all the times you tried and didn’t make it to where you wanted to go. Fear is the monotonous monologue that was instilled in you from a very young age, always spouting its warnings: “Be careful. This can’t last. You don’t deserve it. No one can have it all. Who do you think you are?” Instead of standing up for yourself and shouting back, “I am a powerful, confident, and worthy woman,” you succumb to fear, bow your head in shame, and continue on the path you are on, even if you don’t like it—and even if it’s taking you down.

The more depressing news is that if you don’t take up the battle with fear and win, the voice gets louder and louder with each passing year. It gains strength like a tropical storm. Before you know it, fear has the force and power of a hurricane sweeping through your life, destroying all you’ve worked for and all you’ve dreamed about.

If you’re not clear about how your Voice of Fear talks to you, ask yourself if maybe any of this sounds familiar:

You’re too fat.

You’re too old.

You’re too short.

You’re too stupid.

You’re too uneducated.

Nobody wants you.

You won’t belong.

You’ll be rejected.

You’re good for nothing.

You’ll never amount to anything.

Your time has passed.

Maybe it shouts out:

It’s all your fault.

You made the wrong choices.

Your time has come and gone.

Maybe your Voice of Fear is more of a whisper, always telling you:

Watch out!

Be careful!

What are they going to think of you?

You’ll be teased, shunned, ashamed, embarrassed.

You’ll make a fool of yourself.

Maybe your Voice of Fear is doubt:

But what if it’s a mistake?

What if there isn’t anyone else for me?

What if I can’t get another job?

It’s gotta be my fault.

Don’t make a move yet—not till you’re sure.

There’s somebody else better for the job.

I’m never appreciative or grateful—that’s why things don’t work out for me.

Maybe it intrudes in your relationships and tells you:

Don’t trust!

Don’t open your mouth!

Don’t ask for what you need!

Don’t give too much!

Don’t open your heart!

Don’t try again!

Don’t let go of control!

Maybe the Voice of Fear is one of denial:

One day . . . some day . . .

I’ll handle it later.

I am better.

Look at how far I’ve come.

I’ve done enough.

If this is all I have, it’s okay.

Maybe your Voice of Fear is defensive or blaming:

It’s all their fault!

It shouldn’t have happened to me.

Why should I have to change?

Why do I have to get over it?

Why should I forgive?

I’ll show them!

They did it to me.

The world did it to me.

Maybe your Voice of Fear comes in the form of confusion:

I don’t know what to do.

I’m stuck.

I need help.

I’m overwhelmed.

I don’t know what I want.

Maybe fear shows up as self-obsession, listening over and over again to why you don’t deserve the body you want, the love you want, the health and vitality that you want, the career that you want, or the intimacy that you want.

Or maybe fear appears as the proverbial pity party that takes place when real grief goes undigested and unhealed:

I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.

I can’t believe this has happened to me.

I don’t think anybody really understands what I’ve gone through.

At the end of the day, no one really cares.

When faced with our fears (which happens several times a day for most of us), we have learned to avoid, deny, or muscle through them. To access our courage, we must uncover, accept, and embrace our fears. And the only way to embrace our fears is to recognize them for what they are. That is, we need to accept them as misperceptions that have been birthed out of experiences from the past or as part of the challenge of growing. Fear is built into our human operating system. It is a useful emotion that can, however, go seriously awry.

You might have noticed that trying to ignore your fears doesn’t usually work. Try as you may, in times of stress or heartache they will appear again unless they are embraced. You can eat over your fears, drink, shop, stay busy, do more, complain, gossip, and on and on—all in the pursuit of numbing out and ignoring the barrier that stands between you and your courage. After accepting that you have your particular brand of fears and acknowledging the cost of letting them direct your life, you begin to get some breathing room in which you can observe them more clearly and with greater understanding. You begin to embrace your fears rather than being ruled by them.

You might have heard the adage “What you resist persists.” Understanding this statement is the key to embracing your fears. Resisting, judging, and hating your fears only allows them to have a tighter grip. When you ignore, judge, or hide them, you are actually handing over your power to them. The way to reclaim this power is not to vanquish your fears but to open your heart to the wounded part of yourself—your little Scaredy Cat.

I love and nurture this Scaredy Cat part of myself. I don’t try to make it go away or be anything other than what it is—a part of me that carries my fear. When I fail to acknowledge and have compassion for my fearful self, I wind up in a downward spiral of negativity. When I acknowledge my fear and stay open to the gifts that it holds, I have access to the confidence and courage that I need to be authentically who I am.

Although suppressed fear is the culprit behind terrible suffering, when fear is embraced it acts as the fuel that propels you into a world of courage and confidence. Befriended fear is a worthy ally urging you to move forward in the areas of your life where you are unfulfilled or emotionally challenged.

Let’s look to our sacred wounds, the ones that are clothed in fear. There we will find the key to clearing our minds and reviving our warrior hearts. And we will find ourselves further along the road to meeting the confidence and courage that will transform our lives.

From the beginning of time, great women have written to one another about confidence. The author Astrid Alauda wrote:

I’ve spent most of my life walking under that hovering cloud, jealousy, whose acid raindrops blurred my vision and burned holes in my heart. Once I learned to use the umbrella of confidence, the skies cleared up for me and the sunshine called joy became my faithful companion.

Confidence seems to be one of those qualities that most of us long to have more of. We believe that this uplifting feeling is the answer to our dreams, that it will allow us to ask for what we want, let us speak up when we are not being heard, and give us the ability to handle whatever the universe sends our way. In short, we believe that it will make life better. This belief is built on a truth: confidence does in fact make life better. Much better. But there is a kind of confidence that goes beyond the definitions we find in dictionaries or at motivational seminars, and we are about to stop the search for this elusive thing and actually claim it.

We tend to use the terms “confidence” and “self-confidence” interchangeably. However, distinguishing their qualities is pivotal to claiming our courage. When we talk about confidence, we’re often referring to situations and circumstances “out there.” We say things like, “I’m confident that everything will work out for the best. I’m confident that everyone will show up on time. I’m confident that the judicial system will prevail. I’m confident that they will do the right thing.” Although coming from a place of personal belief, this kind of confidence always depends on something outside of ourselves.

Self-confidence is a belief in oneself, a belief in one’s own strengths and capabilities. Closely tied to our self-esteem, it is a kind of trust in ourselves. What is interesting to note is that very often we display self-confidence in certain areas and not others. We see this all the time: someone who’s confident in caring for and raising her children but not in her ability to run a business; someone who’s confident in understanding complex technical data but not in her ability to have a one-on-one conversation; or a performer who’s confident in standing onstage in front of thousands of people but not in her ability to have a close, intimate partnership.

The truth is, we need both confidence and self-confidence. They are two sides of the same coin. The state of our personal lives and of our world as a whole is asking us to come to understand confidence at a much deeper level, to reacquaint ourselves with the true confidence that lies at the heart of the matter.

When we begin to explore confidence, we have to distinguish it from the false confidence of our ego structure. False confidence is designed to hide our insecurities and trick us into believing that we are okay. It is the job of the ego to distinguish itself from others, so we are trained from a young age to believe that we are individual human beings, separate from everyone and everything around us. Convinced of the ego’s authority through years of listening to its repetitive internal talk, we buy into the sad belief that we are not a part of any divine plan. The ego’s full-time job is to maintain this idea of separation through judgment, comparison, and distraction. We judge that we’re better than somebody or worse than somebody, that we’re luckier than somebody or unluckier than someone else, that we’re better-looking than that person or that we’re uglier than this one, that we’re special, that we’re more important or less important. This litany of comparison is happening inside our ego.

The ego employs this strategy of distraction to keep us from questioning, exploring, and possibly stumbling upon a deep insight or, heaven forbid, a deeper truth. The ego is comfortable staying in its safe zone of aloneness and, like a partner in the worst kind of codependent relationship, doesn’t want us to get emotionally involved with a higher reality. So we can bet it’s our ego that is calling the shots when we’re distracted by guilty pleasures, trivialities, fantasies, addictions, and other people’s problems.

Inside this paradigm, we shore up our insecurities by comparing and judging. But the problem here is that the ego is a bottomless pit of insecurities. Like the fears that underlie them, the various defense mechanisms of the ego are often accompanied by loud, opinionated, and arrogant voices that sound like this:

If only I ruled the world, it would be a different place.

If only I was in charge.

I know what’s best for _________________.

If only they had listened to me.

I know better than any of those other stupid people.

The whole world is filled with idiots.

If only we didn’t have to work with all these incompetent people, everything would be okay.

I don’t need anybody.

The rules don’t apply to me. I can do whatever I want.

I’m in a different league.

I’m better than they are.

This is the ego’s false bravado masquerading as confidence. We use it as a protective mechanism that keeps our self-image intact, the fabricated self we have come to identify with so completely. This false confidence prevents us from seeing who we really are and from accessing the state of being in which true self-confidence resides. But its effectiveness is guaranteed to be short-lived. This false self-confidence never really does its job of protecting us from our deep insecurities. We can be all dressed up and ready to go, and then someone can walk by and give us one sideways look, and insecurity is back, rearing its ugly little head. The reason our insecurities can grab us without a moment’s notice and take our feeling of confidence away is that we never really had true confidence to begin with.

By definition, false confidence works only when it is talking you and everyone else into believing that you have it all together. But false confidence comes with its own form of punishment when it gets pierced by an experience it doesn’t want, like being questioned, doubted, or ignored. Then, without hesitation, it turns into its own hell, condemning you for how you have failed at this unwinnable game. This is when you can be certain that your ego is at the helm. Instead of picking you up off the floor of defeat, it tears you down, diminishing any real confidence that you may have had. Instead of having compassion for yourself, you berate yourself, examining your behavior through the lens of perfectionism. Or instead of acknowledging your own accomplishments, you devalue them by comparing yourself with others. If the impact of this game wasn’t so devastating, we could simply write it off as the most boringly predictable pattern imaginable. But we can’t be glib about it, because it is tragic. Our ego structure would have us stay myopically focused on our own individual lives, playing on an itty-bitty stage where there is room for only one actor—one separate self. But the truth is that nobody is born to an insignificant life. There is not one life that doesn’t add tremendous value to the whole.

Somewhere inside of us we know this to be true; we hear the call (however faint it might be) to head in the direction of this bigger life. Built on a bedrock of authenticity, this life asks us to consider what real confidence is. What would we have to know to actually embody true and authentic confidence?

In order to access true confidence, we must lift ourselves out of the fear of the individual ego structure and live in a brave new world, a paradigm of connection with a force greater than ourselves alone. It may not be easy to lift ourselves out of the fear, but it’s a choice that we can make. And even more than a choice, it’s a transformation. It takes us to a place where we must completely rearrange our thinking.

THE BELLE OF THE BALL

By the time I reached my late twenties, I had learned how to look confident even when I wasn’t. I practiced being one of the popular Miami partygoers, and, most important, I felt like I was special. I went to work for the Cricket Club, one of Miami’s posh hot nightspots, as the membership director. I wanted this job so badly because I felt that in an instant it would give me the kind of power that would add to my confidence and shine a big, bright light on me. At the time, Miami was known for its private clubs, where people would come in droves to feel good, to feel special, to feel alive. Everyone would get decked out and show up for a long night of drinking, dancing, and partying that would ultimately end in great sex. Now I would be in charge of who would gain entry into one of these exclusive nightclubs and who would have to wait in line for hours. So each night I got dressed up in one of my many disco-era dresses and went off to my important job. I felt like I was someone.

We often had princes, princesses, counts, dukes, and other dignitaries visit our club. They always arrived wearing the most beautiful Italian suits and Parisian dresses, accompanied by an entourage of security and other followers. Now I had the job of meeting them and making sure they had the finest tables and were taken care of like, well, royalty. And because they always spent a fortune at the club, their special treatment was felt by management to be justified. One evening, we were visited by a European count who became very entranced with me. Of course, it raised my self-esteem level twenty points when he asked me to join his group for cocktails and dinner. Since I couldn’t really leave my post, I said I would come and sit with them when things slowed down. The Count and his companions were so entertaining, fun, and different from most people I had conversations with that I became fascinated by him and his world.

The next day, I received two dozen beautiful roses along with an invitation to join the Count in Paris for a few “affairs” (the English word they used to mean “parties”) as his date. We met for a late lunch that same day. As you might imagine, I wanted to have a romantic fairy-tale adventure, but I also knew that I wasn’t ready to jump into bed and have a relationship with this man. My attraction wasn’t one of love; it was one of intrigue. So, as we talked through his proposal, I shared my feelings with him, telling him that it sounded like a magnificent trip but that I in no way wanted to go with him if he expected me to sleep with him. I said it in every way I could, because I knew that otherwise it would be a problem for me. I couldn’t imagine that a jet-setting man would want to bring a woman on a date from Miami to Paris, first-class, all expenses paid, if there wasn’t at least the possibility of some sex between them. The Count assured me that this was the least of his concerns and that he knew plenty of women who would readily agree to have sex with him. The obvious truth of this statement made both of us laugh, which sealed the deal. And with a little hesitation still lurking, I said yes. We talked about the different parties and who would be there, dignitaries from around the world. Since I didn’t know who any of these people were, I just kept nodding my head so I would appear more worldly than I actually was at that age.

The Count asked me if I had the proper clothes to wear. I didn’t have any idea what would be “proper,” but I told him I had clothes like the dress I was wearing the night I met him, which I believed was stunning. He insisted that such clothes wouldn’t work for this weekend and said that we’d stop in New York and go shopping before we went on to Paris. I had stepped right into a young woman’s fantasy world.

Two weeks later, after just a few phone conversations, I was preparing to travel to New York and go shopping with the Count. The adventure was now beginning. I was picked up at my apartment, whisked away to the Miami airport, and seated in first class on the plane. I didn’t know if he was kidding, but he told me all I needed to bring was a toothbrush, that he would get everything else, including the right luggage. I was picked up at the airport in New York in the most gorgeous black town car and taken to the Hotel Pierre, where I was met by a doorman in white gloves. He quickly took me up to the room to meet the man I would now call “my count.” (I’m not sure why, because I didn’t want him to be “my” count. I wanted him to be my friend.) In the luxury suite, I saw that there was only one king-size bed, and I asked the Count if that was going to be the arrangement. He very kindly promised that he would not roll over to my side of the bed and that he would honor our agreement, which allowed me to exhale. After a wonderful dinner, we went to sleep early because we had only one day in New York for our big shopping spree.

The next day was definitely like something out of the movies. We first stopped at Louis Vuitton to get my new luggage and then continued on to what seemed like every designer store on Fifth Avenue. Eventually, we landed at Yves Saint-Laurent, where he bought me three of the most beautiful gowns, a coat, jewelry, shoes, and purses. If nothing else, I was going to look really good. With each bag and bracelet, my confidence soared and my enchanting dream became increasingly real. I had certainly had people buy me beautiful gifts before, but this was beyond belief. I remember thinking that the coat cost more than my entire wardrobe for the year. And I could see the thrill the Count was having at being able to dress me up and make sure that the woman on his arm would turn heads. When we arrived back at the hotel late that night and dropped exhaustedly into bed, he was a true gentleman.

The next morning, we boarded our nonstop flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. By the time we arrived I was ready for a long bath and a good night’s sleep, even though it was only the afternoon. The car brought us to the Plaza Athénée Hotel, and as we checked in to the most beautiful suite I had ever seen, I marveled at every detail, from the bedding to the drapes to the antique couches and armoires. We freshened up, had a bite to eat, and partook of a second uneventful night of sleep.

The next day, Friday, was the first big party—a formal ball with an after-party at the famous Régine’s nightclub. As I put on one of my new dresses, a metamorphosis was taking place. With each shoe, with each glove, with the sparkling necklace and my stunning coat, I was filled with a kind of confidence I didn’t even know existed. I felt like a million dollars and was sure that I looked like that, too. The ball was beautiful—like something I had seen on the big screen while eating popcorn. Women were lavishly dressed in haute couture and priceless jewelry. The Count did indeed seem to know everybody. And when he pronounced my name with his accent, it sounded to my ears as if he were presenting a famous socialite from the United States.