Fear consumes so many of us. It kills all the things that we could do that are good. And we want to defeat fear and we want to push through it. But we don’t know how. Most of the time we give up. We end it right there. We stop practicing and we try something else.

But guess what?

Sooner or later fear will kill that too.

If we let it.

The alternative is to not let fear win and stop it dead in it’s tracks. But how?

The answer is simple.

Stop worrying what people will think.

Let’s face it we’re not really frightened of singing a solo in front of a concert hall full of people. We love music. We’re not really afraid of getting up and speaking to a room full of eyes looking back at you expectantly. We love expressing ideas and sharing them. We’re not really afraid of riding a rollercoaster. It’s going to be fun and we know it.

What we are really afraid of is the end. The reaction. We are afraid of people not liking what we wrote or said or played.

Like all artists we are afraid of dying.

Our fear is misdirected. It shouldn’t be in the act of the thing we are excited about. The fear is of the judgement afterwards.

“He was too long.” “She sang off key a little”. “I disagree completely with what she wrote”. “He doesn’t know what he is talking about”. “I could do better than that”.

That’s what we’re really afraid of. Sure some things no matter how much we feel we were made to do them are scary sometimes. That’s natural.

It’s just that the reactions above aren’t real. They aren’t what people are saying. They are what we think people are saying.

You can’t control what everyone thinks. All you can do is pursue your gifts, your passions and those things that persuade you to get up in the morning.

Fear won’t always disappear. We need it to keep growing. This isn’t a contradiction though. It’s a rally cry to realize that fear doesn’t have the hold over us that we think it does because in the end we can’t worry about or control what people will think because people will think what they like.

The real question is, are others opinions a good enough reason to give up?