The Purpose of Fear

It doesn’t feel good does it, fear? It feels horrible. Also, have you noticed, no matter how often you feel it, you never look forward to feeling it again.

What even is fear? What’s the purpose of it? Isn’t it a warning mechanism for apparent danger? An internal air-raid siren? It usually appears when we’re confronted with the unknown. For example;’ I’m not sure what will happen if I leave my job for a career in photography,’ or ‘I want to put on an exhibition of my work at the local gallery but I’m scared no fucker will show up’ and I’ll be the laughing stock of this life and the next.

Fear’s job is to protect us from danger, apparently.

This was all fine and dandy back in the day when we had bears to contend with or little dinosaurs trying to break into our caves and steal our food and eat our kids.

The thing is we’re not living in caves anymore.

Ok … look it’s true we do need fear. I’m not totally dissing it. We need that conditioned fear response or we’d just be walking out in front of traffic and doing back flips off of cliff tops without any training and stuff. I get that.

FEAR IS AN IDIOT

But the problem is fear is a bit of an idiot frankly. It doesn’t deliberate. It throws its weight about a bit too much for its own good and somewhere along the way we let it take over the decision-making process.

Have you noticed that fear doesn’t want us to take risks or experience anything that it hasn’t experienced before. It hates the unknown. It wants us to sit on the sofa and watch boxsets. God forbid we take a risk and start living the life of our dreams. That’s too much of an unknown proposition. It’ll go into overdrive.

When we’re starting out in photography we tend to play it safe. We latch on to as many reference points as possible. We see what others are doing in our field, which to be fair is often fairly mundane, and we tend to pretty much copy what they are doing as a kind of comfort blanket. When we go this route it’s more or less impossible to stand out from the crowd. We’re playing it safe and as a consequence our photographs will be, well … safe. Fear keeps us locked in a safety bubble. To be original we need to push beyond our fear and be willing to take a fucking risk now and again.

HOW DO WE GET RID OF FEAR?

So how do we turn fear off? We can’t. That’s not part of the deal. What we can do is bring awareness into play. You see mostly fear is running our lives and we have no idea that is what it’s doing. We feel the fear but we’re not aware of the total power it has over us and without awareness, we’re nothing more than puppets dangling on its string.

The problem is when we’re feeling scared the last thing we want is to stay feeling scared. We do everything in our power to remove the feeling from our bodies and it usually involves running for cover, looking for the quickest source of comfort, preferably under a duvet with a tub of Ben and Jerrys, a massive spoon and a the tv remote.

Yes yes yes. But what the fuck can we do about it man?

Ok. Ready?

You have to embrace it. You have to feel it. Like really feel that shit and notice what it’s mostly telling us to do - which is to turn and run.

FEAR IS USEFUL

It may be we’re out on our first paid family portrait shoot and when you arrive the family are a little less excited than you thought they were going to be. It maybe takes the wind out of your sails as you had a dozen shots lined up that call for a little more willingness from the client. Your discomfort kicks in. The idea you was going to suggest for a shot suddenly feels like a small mountain to climb. You’re fearful of even suggesting it in case they reject it out of hand. The urge to do something safer washes over you.

If we can get ahead of that urge, if we can see it, and be willing to feel it out, then we have a choice. We can begin to respond rather than react which is what we are doing most of the time.

You see the thing is, Fear is actually one of the most useful emotions we have. We just need to use it rather than let it use us. If you can begin to do that you’re going to see it’s like a huge big fucking beacon showing us a possibility.

THE PRACTICE

Look at your own experience because for sure there have been times where you have pushed through fear and come out on the other side. Possibly you’ve been supported by someone else or simply you’ve had a moment of courageous spontaneity and you didn’t turn away. You kept moving forward. You pushed thru the fear barrier.

Can you remember how you felt afterward? Possibly you felt great. Even exhilarated. Your world expanded. You took on new information. And as is often the case you probably saw that what you feared wasn’t that scary at all, it was all in your mind.

It may be you suggest your photo idea to the family and they don’t want to go with it. But the fact of the matter is you’re no worse off than when you started. All that has happened is that they said no. If you push through and ask at the very least you’ll know you did your best.

The practice is to begin to look at the moments in your day when you feel scared. Look for fear. Feel it in your body. The moment you are aware of the mechanics of fear you then have a choice where there wasn’t one before.

G

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