Concept
The truths about fear
Susan Jeffers's truths about fear: it never goes away as long as you keep growing; the only way to get rid of the fear of something is to go out and do it; everyone feels it, including those who look as if they do not.
Jeffers found, over years of workshops, that people were organising their lives around a hope that the fear would leave before they acted, and that it never did, because every new thing is new. The truths are meant to end the hope and replace it with a choice. The last truth is the centre: you are not choosing between fear and comfort but between two fears, the loud, bounded fear of doing the thing, which ends when the thing ends, and the quiet, permanent fear of a life organised around avoidance, which erodes a person and never ends. The loud one is cheaper. Once that is accepted, the fear's presence stops being a warning and becomes a sign of growth, and the question changes from how to feel less afraid to what to do with the fear present. Harris's confidence gap is the same finding described by a therapist twenty years later.
A real-life example
A pharmacist in Bursa has avoided a conversation with her landlord for two winters, hoping to feel ready. Reading the truths, she sees she has been paying the quiet fear every day to avoid the loud one once. She makes the call that afternoon.
How to use it
- 1Expect fear at the door of every new thing; its presence means growth, not error.
- 2Name the two fears and compare their prices; the loud one ends.
- 3Ask what to do with the fear present, not how to make it leave.