My daughter is almost six. This year, for the first time, she has fears.
Not the vague, unformed anxiety of early childhood — that was different. That was discovery. She did not yet know what she was afraid of, so she was not really afraid of anything. She was just exploring. But something shifted this year. Now there is a white monster. Now the dark hallway has something in it. Now she stops at the edge of something and looks back at me with an expression I recognise — because I have seen it on my own face in a mirror, dressed in adult clothes and carrying adult problems.
My instinct, like most parents, is to say: be courageous. There is nothing to fear. You can do it. And I watch her face as I say these things, and I can see that they do not help. Not because she does not trust me. But because the fear is real to her, and telling someone their real feeling is wrong does not make the feeling go away. It just adds confusion on top of it.
I have spent forty-something years having people tell me the same thing. Be courageous. There is nothing to fear. You can do it. And I can confirm, from the inside, that it does not work for adults either.
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Fear is one of the oldest and most precisely engineered systems in the human brain. The amygdala — the small almond-shaped structure deep in the brain that processes threat — responds to perceived danger before the conscious mind has time to evaluate whether the danger is real. This is not a malfunction. It is the feature. For most of human history, the cost of a false positive (running from something that was not actually dangerous) was much lower than the cost of a false negative (not running from something that was). So the brain evolved to err heavily toward alarm.
The problem is that this ancient system is now running inside a world where the threats are almost never physical. The white monster in the hallway. The presentation you have been avoiding for three weeks. The difficult conversation you keep postponing. The creative project you have not started because starting would make it real and real things can fail. The amygdala cannot tell the difference between a predator and a performance review. It fires the same alarm either way.
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"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." — Joseph Campbell |
Campbell was describing the hero's journey in mythology. But he was also describing something precise about the psychology of avoidance: what we fear most is almost always the thing that contains the most important information about who we actually are and what we actually want. The avoidance is not random. It has a shape. And the shape points somewhere.
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I did an exercise a while ago that I found more useful than any framework I have encountered on this subject. I sat down and listed every fear I could identify — honestly, without editing. Not the fears I am comfortable admitting, but all of them. Fear of loss. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of losing. Fear of becoming a burden. Fear of not winning. Fear of losing a job. Fear of not performing. Fear of failing someone who believed in me.
The list was longer than I expected. And almost every item on it had something in common: it had not happened. Most of my fears were stories my mind was telling me about possible futures — vivid, detailed, emotionally convincing stories that my brain had constructed with the same confidence it applies to actual memories. The mind is doing exactly what it is supposed to do: generating scenarios, identifying risks, modelling threats. It is very good at this. It is also completely indifferent to whether the scenarios are likely.
I am, as I have mentioned before in this newsletter, a naturally negative person. I see risks before opportunities, obstacles before paths, problems before solutions. I have made peace with this — it is not a character flaw, it has a root, and it has also made me good at certain things. But doing this exercise forced me to see something I had been avoiding seeing: underneath all the specific fears was one root fear that generated most of the others.
Mine is the fear of disappointing myself. Not my parents. Not my colleagues. Not my family or friends or any external person. Myself. The standard I hold myself to is entirely internal, which means it moves with me and I can never fully escape it. Every avoidance loop I have ever been in — every project postponed, every difficult conversation deferred, every thing I was not quite ready to start — traces back to this. Not starting means not failing. Not failing means not having to face the gap between what I hoped I was and what I turned out to be.
Knowing this did not make it disappear. But it made the avoidance visible. And visible things are considerably harder to sustain unconsciously.
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My daughter does not have this problem yet. She draws pictures that look nothing like what she was trying to draw, and she holds them up with complete satisfaction. She dances without worrying whether the dancing is good. She makes sentences with grammar mistakes and does not stop mid-sentence to correct herself. She is happy as she is, in the moment she is in, without benchmarking herself against a standard she did not set and does not yet know she is supposed to meet.
We teach children to be afraid of the wrong things. We teach them that the drawing should look like something. That the dancing should be a certain way. That the sentences should be grammatically correct. We do this with good intentions — we are preparing them for a world that will judge them. But we are also, slowly and systematically, installing the mechanism that will make them avoid things for the rest of their lives. Not the white monster. The white monster is manageable. The fear of not being good enough — that one has a much longer shelf life.
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A close friend of mine — a senior consultant, someone who has spent decades helping organisations solve problems — has a habit that used to frustrate me. Whenever I described a problem, he would ask: "What is the resolution?" Not the cause. Not the context. The resolution. I found this impatient for a long time. Now I think he was right, just ahead of schedule.
So: what is the resolution?
Not courage. Courage is the outcome, not the method. Not positive thinking. Not telling yourself the fear is irrational — the amygdala does not respond to logical argument. What actually works, in my experience and increasingly in the research, is something smaller and less dramatic than any of those things.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, in her recent book Tiny Experiments, describes an approach I find genuinely useful — though I do not agree with everything in it. The core idea is this: instead of setting goals around the feared thing, you run small experiments with no predetermined outcome. You are not trying to overcome the fear. You are not trying to achieve something. You are just trying something, once, with no attachment to what it produces.
Steve Jobs once said something I have thought about many times:
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"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again." — Steve Jobs, 1994 |
The tiny experiment is a poke. Not a transformation. Not a commitment. Just a poke — the smallest possible action in the direction of the thing you have been avoiding — to see what happens.
The aim is not to become something. The aim is to do something, for the sake of doing it. If you are afraid of writing, you write one paragraph. Not to become a writer. Just to see what one paragraph feels like. If you are afraid of a difficult conversation, you say one true sentence. Not to resolve the relationship. Just to see what one true sentence costs you. If you are afraid of being seen — which is the fear underneath most creative avoidance — you share one small thing, with one person, and you notice what actually happens versus what you predicted would happen.
The only metric worth tracking — if you are a metric person, and I understand if you are — is energy. Not results. Not progress toward a goal. Just: after doing this thing a few times, with no agenda, does it give you energy or take it? That signal, over time and repeated honestly, tells you more about what you should be doing with your life than any five-year plan.
My daughter will eventually understand what she is afraid of. That is unavoidable — consciousness brings self-awareness and self-awareness brings fear. But I hope she keeps something of what she has now: the willingness to draw the imperfect picture and hold it up anyway. The willingness to dance without checking whether she is doing it right. The willingness to try things just to see what happens, without needing to know in advance that it will go well.
That is not childishness. That is the thing we spend decades trying to find our way back to.
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This week's insight Find your root fear — the one underneath all the others. Sit with it honestly, without arguing with it or trying to fix it. Then pick the smallest possible experiment in the direction of the thing you have been avoiding. Not to overcome the fear. Not to achieve something. Just to see what actually happens when you poke the thing, versus what your mind has been telling you will happen. The gap between those two is where most of the wasted years live. |