Self Coaching for Overcoming Fears

 Any understandings that can help you move forward on an agenda, especially ones that help you overcome fear of disapproval, are of real value in over coming various forms of reluctance.

In notes kept over a number of years, I have collected a variety of methods for overcoming fear. These are mostly “psychological type” fears such as fear failure, fear of rejection or fear of disapproval. The methods heavily emphasize tactics that prevent fears from arising in the first place.

To overcome fear, people need to:

Refute irrational beliefs… in cognitive psychology, this is a favorite techniques and is particularly suited to fears of disapproval. 

Some of the ways people formulate irrational beliefs are by:  l. All or nothing thinking… you see things in black and white categories; if your performance falls short of being perfect, you see your self as a total failure. 2. Overgeneralization… you see a single negative happening as a never-ending pattern of defeat, or rejection, etc. 3. Disqualifying the positive… you reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by everyday experiences.

These are just a few of the ways irrational beliefs come up. They need to be examined and surrendered if more positive, coping styles are to be maintained. If you realize how you formed some of your irrational beliefs, as by these methods mentioned above, then hopefully you will be ready to discard them.

Other ways of overcoming fear are: avoiding jumping to conclusions. You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that support your conclusions; discard mind reading… this is when you conclude, falsely, that someone is reacting negatively to you and you don’t bother to check this out.  This is also known as the FORTUNE TELLER ERROR.

Finally, another cognitive error to avoid is catastrophizing or minimization.  Catastrophizing is when you exaggerate the importance of little things that happen and scare your self unnecessarily. Minimizing is when you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick”.

A self coaching approach calls for implanting the tools of self encouragement. These include taking the self as an object that can be changed and improved upon.  Reflecting on past accomplishments also furthers a self coaching approach for it enhances your determination and confidence.

 

Self guidance calls for planning and executing strategies that help you attain personal goals, despite your fears.  Fear can be minimized by knowing exactly how you are going to proceed when fear strikes.  A viable self coaching technique here is the pre commitment technique that heightens the cost of giving in to fear, or temptation.

Finally the development of goals that are expressive of deeply held values is always an optimal self coaching strategy. Because these goals have personal meaning to an individual and reflect an individual's self-identity, self-concordant goals are more likely to receive sustained effort over the long haul.