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 shock or fear reactions in the child by communicating their own fear about what the baby is doing ("Oh my God! you will hurt yourself.").
And it doesn't matter if later in life there is evidence to the contrary of this "you'll hurt yourself" programming. Once the lie is repeated long enough, it's your new truth. In the fifth grade, there was a boy my age who was the most fearless athlete in our neighborhood. I'll call him Jimmy. He was taunting me for something or other, and for some unknown reason my brain fused, all fear left me, and I punched him. I decked him with a furious blow to his jaw that left him sprawled on the ground. I looked into his eyes, and they were huge. He was temporarily very scared of what had just happened. I quickly walked home, not wanting to continue this physical exchange, and neither of us ever spoke of it again. Later I would read of his prowess as an all-state linebacker who was physically reckless and feared no one. Even though I had decked him, my biocomputer would not let that incident become new evidence of anything. Even though I did something I was afraid to do, I still culti¬vated the lie that if I was afraid to do something, then I could not do it. My brain already made up its program and script. The knockdown punch was deliberately dismissed as an anomaly, a mistake. It was a fluke. One of those lucky sucker punches you read about. A phantom shot like Ali against Sonny Liston. But was it? Couldn't it have been what William Butler Yeats was talking about when he wrote about completing the partial mind: When a man is fighting mad Something drops from eyes long blind He completes his partial mind. When conscious and subconscious fuse rapidly, the left side of the brain shouts to the right, "Drop this guy! You can do it! Now!" When fused together, I become Superman. I complete my partial mind. Bring on Charlie. Once I was willing to give up the "I'm a total coward" act, I could talk to myself differently. I became something like my own parent. I did some essential reparenting and told my inner boy that Charlie was the coward, not me. And that if Charlie had pushed me one inch further, I would have crushed his jaw, broken his nose, and sent him home crying to his mother. The true me was the one who floored Jimmy with one punch. That was the true self below the lie. I could always draw on that self when I wanted to. The truth is that every human has as much courage as the current purpose requires. Courage is always in us, like a heartbeat, like breath. It's in all of us in equal measure. To say we don't have it is to lie. It's to deliberately generate a horrible superstition, a vision of fear, a vision of a human with an animal's head. The lie keeps us from being bold. It keeps us from bravely striking out in the name of our dig¬nity. If we exaggerate the fear, we can claim that it has immobilized us. Why aren't you taking action? "I am para¬lyzed with fear" is the claim. It's a claim made to forgive inactivity. My own son, Bobby, doesn't have the same fear of get¬ting hurt that I had at his age. In fact, in my own painful awareness of how false programming can happen, I have been acutely aware, maybe even to a fault, of how my chil¬dren deal with physical fear. For example, I always encouraged Bobby to fall and take his tumbles. He enjoyed it so much that as he got a little older, he turned it into a stage act that would horrify friends and relatives. As a little boy no more than four years old, he would love taking dramatic pratfalls like a tiny stuntman. What he loved most was watching grown-ups shriek and panic as he stood on a chair and tipped backward, rotating his arms in a pinwheeling motion while yelling "Whoa! Whoa! Whoooooa!" Then he would fall to the floor and pre¬tend to be out cold. When people gathered around him (I was never among them) he would sit up laughing like a cute little maniac, annoying everyone but me. I knew what he was doing. He was showing me what my own childhood could have been. I loved it because by then I realized that you can live your childhood again, not through your chil¬dren, but inspired by them all the same. Little Bobby was the opposite of me! I was so timid when I was young that I actu¬ally looked at people in wheelchairs longingly. That would be so safe. Today I watch Bobby play basketball like a boy possessed. He is thirteen years old, and when he gets the fire in his soul he rebounds in a fury, knocking bodies down as he tears the ball off the backboard. I watch him with a sense of wonder because when I was his age, I also played basketball, but I didn't play like Bobby. I played guard and made certain that I got through each game with as little physical contact as possible. In fact, my best shot was a baseline fadeaway jumper that ended with me actually going out of bounds after launching the shot. Out of bounds and beyond the field of play. I didn't enjoy being in bounds. That's where the players were. And they were aggressive. I don't know what finally became of Charlie. But I do know that Charlie would not stand a chance with me today. He wouldn't even stand a chance with that "inner child" (the memory cluster in my brain that recalls the feelings of the little boy) inside of me. Because I can talk to that child now. I can grow him up. I can show him the moves to use on Charlie. The self-concept of cowardice brings about the lie that being afraid to act is being unable to act. The truth is that I can always find courage. It's right there inside the fear! It's like a jewel inside a closed fist. It is not something I don't have. It's not a missing gene. Courage reveals itself in action. "See?" says the courage. "I was always here for you. I am always here for you. I am a basic part of who you really are." Visit www.SteveChandler.com for more information.
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