17 Lies That Are Holding You Back & The Truth That Will Set You Free by Steve Chandler - LIE FOUR - I CAN'T BECAUSE I'M AFRAID - "I am afraid to do it," I would always say to myself. And then I would believe that if I were afraid to do something, that was the same as not being able to do it. "Are you going to do that, Steve?" "No. I can't. I'm afraid to." There was a bully in my first grade who was larger than I was. Somehow he could sense that I was afraid of being in school (I was afraid of being anywhere without my mother), so he decided to play upon that fear and see just how afraid he could make me. This guy whom I will call Charlie was like the killer on the road whose brain was squirming like a toad that Jim Morrison sang about in "Riders on the Storm." Maybe Charlie believed that the more afraid he could make me the better he himself would feel. As long as he was terri¬fying someone, he could not at that very moment be terrified. But what happened to me was that I took Charlie seri¬ously. Like some people really create a virtual Satan after thinking about him long enough, I did the same with Charlie. I scripted mental software about Charlie that said I was, deep down inside of me, someone who could be paralyzed with fear. Paralyzed, fearing not only fear itself but fearing fear itself so fiercely that my whole life became absolutely frightening. I almost longed for something real to come along, like a big Michigan tornado, that frightened everyone so that I could just feel fear along with everyone else and test whether it was true that I felt fear more than others. Charlie found me again and again in the hallways and on the playground. He looked at me, and he threatened me. He was going to hurt me in ways I'd never been hurt. Back then it never occurred to me how badly Charlie himself must have been shaken up by someone to treat me this way. I thought it was something in me. In my dreams, Charlie appeared as a large boy with a dog's head on him, an inhuman thing, outright evil, twisting and reeking of the stench of cruelty. I began fearing my dreams of Charlie at night. In them I would be looking out of the window of my home, way down the road at Charlie in a trench coat with a dog's head on top, who ducked away when it saw me. I was a coward. That's what I programmed into my bio-computer at the time: you coward. ("I don't have what it takes. I don't have it in me to stand up to this.") I then col¬lected numerous forms of evidence to confirm the "truth" of that. I was always afraid of getting hurt. They were going to hurt me. It was going to hurt me. Tony Buzan and Michael Gelb talk about our inordinate fear of getting hurt in their book Lessons from the Art of Jug¬gling. You and I begin our lives as fearless beings and then get re-programmed: Masters of trial-and-error learning, babies fall repeat¬edly. They do it in a relaxed, almost comfortable manner, making it unlikely that they will be harmed. Anxious parents, however, often induce ...

Show full text: 8,847 characters