Psychological Fears Revisited

We discussed types of fears in previous lessons. Let us revisit them now to see how they diminish our power and what we can do to minimize them. There are two types of fears: psychological and physiological. We will revisit psychological fears in this lesson.
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Psychological fears originate from our egos. We may experience fear of failure or success. Our egos feel diminished when we fail and don’t perform to others expectations. We fear to succeed because we feel others will expect us to continue to perform at that new level.
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Recall that warriors define “power” as the ability to keep attention at the moment. Fearing failure or success focuses our attention on the end result, which we cannot control. If we fail, we fear how others will judge us; if we succeed, we fear we won’t be able to continue to succeed at that level. Our attention is distracted onto how that end result will impact us.
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We need to notice when this occurs and redirect attention to climbing. Climbing is very simple: we need to go from the bottom to the top of a cliff or mountain, taking the reasonable risk along the way. We will stop at stances to think through the next section then we will commit to climbing through that section. Then, repeat. If we notice our attention shift to thoughts of failure or success, simply redirect attention to this process. With our attention focused on this process, psychological fears diminish, and we retain our power to act.
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