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 lose the fear of something is to do it; everyone feels it; and pushing through it is less frightening than living with the helplessness that avoidance brings.
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. Russ Harris's confidence gap, described by a therapist more than twenty years later, reaches the same conclusion.
A real-life example
A teacher in Trabzon has wanted to apply for the deputy head post for three years and has waited each spring to feel ready. Reading Jeffers's truths, she sees the price she has been paying: a low, steady dread every time the post is mentioned, to avoid one frightening interview. She submits the application that week, still afraid.
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.