It’s time to stop living in fear

September 13, 2018

By Brian Maynor

We all have a fear of embarrassing ourselves and coming across as dumb, but is this fear rational?

Most of the time it’s not. The need for acceptance and fear of rejection, ridicule and being ostracized is imbedded deep in our psyche, but it is a very prevalent barrier in our relationships.

Fear prevents us from being ourselves and making authentic connections, especially the fear of coming across as unintelligent.

Here’s a deeper look into living in fear, and how it impacts our interactions:

1. Overcompensation. We all know someone who is constantly trying to impress us with their extensive vocabulary, cleverness or expertise in an effort to convince us they’re smart and capable, but it rarely works. In fact, most of the time we end up dismissing what they say as pompous bluster.

2. Root causes. There isn’t a single root cause for this fear, but most often it can be traced back to some trauma in our childhood. This is particularly true for women. We all know children can be cruel, and with our skewed perception it only takes a single, relatively small in hindsight situation to have a long-lasting impact on our psyche.

3. Rejecting authenticity. Our fear of rejection can be so great that it causes us to completely reject or change our persona depending upon the people we’re around. Not only is that exhausting, it’s selfish. We are robbing others, including our friends, of getting to know the ‘real us’. We are all awesome, amazing, talented and exceptional people in our own unique way.

4. Regulated to the background. When we exist in a constant state of fear, especially around sounding intelligent, we tend to refrain from speaking our mind, asking questions or participating in discussions. That sums up my law school experience in a nutshell. I was surrounded by people as smart and smarter than I was, and my fear of looking stupid caused me to miss out on a lot of opportunities.

5. Put fear in its place. Completely banishing our fear may never happen, but we can certainly gain control over it and stop letting it rule our lives. The best way to this is simply commit to being true to ourselves. It doesn’t matter if we start at home, at work or with complete strangers who we will probably never see again the effect is the same. Authenticity is infectious. Once we embrace it in one aspect of our lives, we can’t help but embrace it in others.

No one is perfect, and making mistakes, misspeaking and being occasionally awkward is part of life. Instead of spending so much time, energy and focus on avoiding them, embrace them. Confidence is the best impression we can make, we can’t get more confident than embracing who we are, flaws and all.