Face everything and rise

They say the word ‘Fear’ can stand for two things: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise’.

Inner Leadership is a step-by-step guide for how we can make ‘Fear’ mean the second: by using it to make us stronger and more inspired.

Achieving this requires us to develop our abilities at seven key skills:

• The first is our ability to remain calm in a crisis: centred and grounded, and connected strongly with who we are at our best, no matter what is happening around us
• ‘Fear’ can also stand for ‘False Evidence Appearing Real’ so the second key skill is the ability to make clearer sense of the situations we find ourselves in and to spot the mistaken assumptions we might be making
• The third and fourth abilities enable us to find the opportunities that exist, even within what looks like a crisis, and to choose the way forward that aligns best with our deepest priorities, even when the situation is unclear and the outcome uncertain
• The fifth skill is to uncover our purpose and values: these not only bring us long term alignment and direction but also short term focus, flexibility, and inspiration
• And the sixth and seventh skills enable us to articulate our chosen goals in ways that inspire ourselves and the people around us to long to make them happen

If we look back through our lives we can probably remember a dozen times when we felt afraid: our first day at a new school, our first driving lesson, our first date, our first job. But every time this happened, behind the fear was also an opportunity for us to learn and grow and expand the life that we are capable of living.

Whenever we find fear keeping us stuck again we need to remember these times and the opportunities they brought. Because when we find what we most long for, and when we learn to overcome our fear and inspire ourselves instead, then even something as terrifying as riding a rodeo bull can actually become an **adventure**!

This is another step to becoming antifragile.

When did you last feel afraid? Would it be useful to know how to reinterpret your fears and turn them into fulfilment and joy instead? Face Everything And Rise.

Adapted from *Inner Leadership*: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.

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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)

Photo By Southern Arkansas University (cropped) via StockPholio.net