Face your fears

Don't you find that, if you really think about it, your fears turn out to be so much bigger in your own head than they are in reality?

I'm thinking about when I have to have a hard conversation, for example. I play the conversation in my head many times before I actually get around to doing the thing. And the reactions I imagine are always stronger than what actually happens. I have the whole adrenalin thing going on, feeling sick, voice shaking etc., ready to be shouted at or argued with or walked away from, and it doesn't happen.

By experience I have found that when I face those hard conversations and go into them with the welfare of the other person uppermost in my mind, with emotion set aside as far as I can do that, then the outcome is so much more favourable than I imagined. Indeed, there was a time when I told someone off and they hugged me!

Experience tells me I should face my fears, because they are so much smaller than what I can conjure up in my imagination.