Courage with Fear

In this episode, we talk about the  interplay between fear and courage. Often, we mistake being frozen in fear, unable to act for being cautious.

I'll share practical methods for recognizing and overcoming irrational fears to help you move forward. We'll explore the "fake it till you make it" approach, particularly useful when the fear of failure feels overwhelming.

We discuss how courage is not about the absence of fear, but about acting in its presence. Plus, we examine fear's role in faith, especially in the Muslim community. Understanding the fine line between love and fear in our spiritual lives, because if you find your faith waning, it might be due to the exhaustion stemming from the constant fear of the afterlife.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Applying tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognisably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Uthar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.

Speaker 1: 0:19

Today's topic is near dear to my heart and I think the month of Ramadan represents the perfect opportunity for me to present it to you. And that has to do with courage. Courage cannot exist without fear, and fear is not the reason not to do something. People tell me I don't want to do this because I'm afraid. I'm afraid of what will happen, I'm afraid of what will the outcome be. What I will offer you is that you find courage in that case, because, think about it there's no need for courage if there's no fear. So fear is not an excuse not to do something. Rather, it's an opportunity for you to find the courage to do it.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Fear is one of the most common underlying emotions. It keeps us alive, it keeps us safe, but it also doesn't serve us in so many other ways. Fear is good when time comes for you to not engage in reckless driving. It's good when you consider not leaving your toddler unattended for the fear of harm. Fear serves your purpose in you trying not to climb up a ladder carelessly. But there is such a thing as misplaced fears, which is fear of confrontation because you call yourself an easygoing person, that's people pleasing that comes at a cost of your dreams. Misplaced fear of leaving an abusive situation because you don't know how you'll survive. Who will take care of you? Misplaced fear does not create any good outcomes. My fear is misplaced when I'm afraid of my kids future, without ever trying to figure out how I can help them now, without finding my courage. When it comes to my kids, I would try and control their lives to the last detail, thinking I'm protecting them, but I'm actually just restricting them. With courage, I can give them room to grow and explore and I can love them and keep them safe rather than just be afraid. Fear is hardwired, it is default, it is primal, it will always be there. So what I'm saying here is unorthodox, as usual. But you don't have to be fearless to do something. You just have to be courageous with it.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Majority of your fear is coming from irrational thoughts, so you're always creating your own fear from the choice of your thoughts. At times, the exception of the fear is when it bypasses your conscious response, like when your husband creeps up on you from behind the door and he screams and you jump up and drop the plate of dinner you were preparing. That fear response bypasses conscious thought and it is the same as when you touch a hot stove and immediately withdraw your hand without thinking about it. We're not talking about that type of fear. If you're living in fear without courage, it means you're living with a mismanaged mind. When you're sitting in your bed, comfy, reading a book, but really just feeling afraid of what neighbors will say in judgment about your broken mailbox, or afraid of your kid's future when they get a D in 3rd grade English, or when you're afraid you're wasting time by spending it reading a book when instead you should be doing something else more productive, these are created fears coming from a mismanaged mind.

Speaker 1: 3:21

So how I want to unfold it for you guys further is that when you recognize fear as an emotion in your body remember C-near algorithm, circumstances, nervous system, thoughts, emotions, actions and results C-near Fear would go in the emotions, something that you experience in the body. Your thoughts create your fear and what I'm encouraging you to do is to just experience the fear, lean in with the sensations and be curious about the thoughts behind it. A lot of times you'll be able to just change those thoughts. But if you cannot immediately change the thought because it's a deeply engraved core belief, go ahead and take action anyways, because in that case you'll be operating from courage, because what you're doing in this case is abrupting the flow of fear just by recognition of it. You'll start to take action, not because of your fear but despite of it, and you'll take action because of courage through the fear. A lot of times you'll be able to find conscious thoughts that are giving you courage, but sometimes you might not be able to. Finding this level of courage without recognition of thoughts is completely acceptable. It's most likely how you're going to operate in the beginning, but you'll become more and more aware of the thoughts that you're creating.

Speaker 1: 4:37

The biggest advantage of this method is that this is a type of a fake it till you make it action. It is when you find out that you will not actually die from the actions you take. It is a calculated risk. There is no actual life-threatening situation like, for example, when you give a speech at your friend's wedding. Fear of embarrassment seems monumental, but the courage of being able to be there for your friend on her special day will be enough to overcome that fear. So if you're exposing yourself to the fear of speech, you're basically doing your own exposure therapy, which is also a very well-known therapeutic modality for people with phobias.

Speaker 1: 5:14

But phobia is an extreme, irrational fear of something, and the mental health provider treats that in a controlled setting and these clinicians slowly expose the person to something they're afraid of. If you have to give a speech at your best friend's wedding and you're afraid, but you do it anyways, you will realize that your exposure therapy proved your original fear wrong. You don't actually die in the event. There's nothing harmful going on, and the more you do that, the more you'll be able to find courage in situations that you've usually been afraid of. The opposite of this is true as well. If you're developing a fear and you don't do anything to address the thoughts behind it, you will never understand that most of these thoughts are irrational. If you continue giving in to fear with a mismanaged mind, it will continue to grow and overtake other areas of your life. The neural pathways of those irrational thoughts will become hardened and you can very well develop a phobia.

Speaker 1: 6:11

In this particular example, it could be a phobia of public speaking, which is called glasophobia, and this is an astonishingly common phenomena Four out of ten Americans are afraid of public speaking. So when you deconstruct this fear of public speaking, you know, even if you're publicly shamed in the spotlight, you're not actually going to die. Nothing life-threatening will actually happen, but some people become more afraid of that shame than of actual death. So it is the managing of the mind and holding your body in compassion and letting yourself go through the somatic experiencing and healing which is the missing link in most of these cases. So think about what it is that you're afraid of. Are you afraid of putting out job applications because you don't think you'll do as well on the interviews? Are you afraid of having children because you don't think you'll be a good parent? Are you afraid of making offers in your business because you think people will turn you down? Or sometimes, surprisingly, what I've seen is that people are actually afraid of their success. If they make offers and are successful at their business, they will fear that they won't be able to deliver what they promised, or they will fear the very next failure, like waiting for the next shoe to drop. This is so fascinating to me and it turns up in my clients over and over again.

Speaker 1: 7:27

Whatever the fear is, just come back to the understanding that there is no life and death situation and that fear, being an emotion, is always caused by our thoughts, so it is always optional. Thoughts like we will be rejected from the group or we will not be good parents All of these thoughts are optional, even if you think about the most terrible situation happening and you feel humiliated and embarrassed because of what you're making it mean, it is only because you're still reacting with the default programming that something has gone wrong. Circumstance of public speaking opportunity does not cause your humiliation. Your thinking does. Job opportunities, interviews, children Do not cause fear. Your thoughts about these things do.

Speaker 1: 8:13

And what about fear in religion? Can that be misplaced? Fear of Allah is healthy because we are being warned of the punishment. Allah swt himself is also all-marsful and the punishment is towards our actions, not towards our thoughts and feelings. So if you can master your qalb, your heart, which is a combination of your mind and your emotions, your thought and feeling pair, inshaallah, there is no need for misplaced fear. Oran also speaks the language of human emotions, fear being something we all feel, and Quran leverages it in helping us correct our actions. Sometimes authority figures invoke fear in you that turns into spiritual abuse, all misplaced fear due to someone else's thoughts.

Speaker 1: 8:58

To me, the driving force of obligatory prayers is better suited to be the emotion of love, mercy, compassion, connection with Allah. But fear is also available if I go far away and I stray, if I'm missing prayers or if I'm not doing with concentration. I feel afraid of what will happen to me in the day of judgment, and that is a healthy use of fear, especially if it brings me back to the action of correcting my prayers. But in my opinion, default emotion behind your acts of ibadah, your acts of worship, needs to be predominantly love and connection Love of Allah swt, love of this religion, love of the Prophet peace be upon him and the love of fulfilling our roles in this temporary world. You will notice, if you adopt any kind of fear as the fuel behind your actions, it will burn right through you, it will be exhaustive.

Speaker 1: 9:51

That is a very high energy emotion and costs you a lot of fuel of energy. So if you're socialized to be in fear of the punishment of Allah in order for you to fulfill your religious obligations and you find yourself wavering in your faith. It is possible that your mind and body are exhausted because of misplaced, exhausting fear. Always only following Allah's commands out of fear can be misplaced. Love, mercy, forgiveness are all of Allah swt's qualities and are much more sustainable when you think about them. If you fuel your ibadah, your acts of worship, your prayers from these emotions, you will find much more khusur, calmness and tranquility. In your prayers, you will find a deeper connection with your Creator, which will be much more effective, inshaallah. So there is a place of fear in religion, as it is the sunnah of Allah. Everything created has a purpose. So does fear. Fear is created and it serves a purpose at times, but it is misplaced if it is present all of the time.

Speaker 1: 10:55

Another very important point when it comes to fear when I ask people what they experience when they feel fear, the actual emotion they tell me about their resistance to fear. They tell me about their discomfort with the fear. It is not a comfortable emotion. By design, you are not supposed to be experiencing blissful calm when afraid. That will defeat the whole purpose of fear, of trying to get your attention. So, just like my clients, you might be avoiding explaining fear because it is uncomfortable, but all emotions are vibrations in your body, and when I ask you to describe fear to me, I want you to break it down to its sensations, because otherwise it will just be suppressing it and avoiding it. So, for example, when I feel fear, I feel a terrible tingling in my chest and arms. It feels like somebody poking needles from inside out and I feel a rush of heat go through my body and sometimes I feel literal chills going down my spine. So whatever you experience when you are feeling fear, so whatever the sensations are when you are feeling fear it might be tingling or skin tensing or muscle tension, whatever it is for you, describe it as a set of sensations, because when you do that, you are bringing consciousness to your Kalb, you're bringing awareness to your inner environment, your experiential self.

Speaker 1: 12:14

I emphasize this technique because it is literally what emotions are designed for. Allah swaandhu ala's wisdom is infinite. We just tap into it briefly with emotions. When people are able to describe their experience of fear, it stops driving their actions from a subconscious level. When we avoid uncomfortable sensations, we engage in avoidance behaviors like overeating because we are eating to subdue the fear, or other avoidance behavior like channeling fear into anger, enrage, outbursts at something outside of us. Avoidance behaviors like yelling at our children or getting upset at our colleagues or getting upset at our professor for giving us a pop quiz all possible because there's some sort of underlying unprocessed fear.

Speaker 1: 13:01

If you don't allow the emotion of fear to flow through you, your body will channel that energy to create other negative emotions. The sensations of fear will not kill you, but the other inadvertent avoidance behaviors that you might be taking out of fear can actually kill you, like overeating for comfort until you're overweight, obesity can actually kill you. Or your anger towards your children can actually be harmful to them at the relationship level. So the emotions are never harmful, but your actions out of avoidance of these emotions are. Again, remember, our questioning will be on our actions, not the emotion. So when you're asked to feel afraid of the punishment of Allah, the questioning will be on your actions that you might take out of fear. So there's a huge difference between experiencing your emotions, which is all about the sensations, and reacting out of emotions.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Allowing yourself to emote would mean you're letting the vibrational energy of the emotion flow through you. So be present with yourself when you're experiencing fear. Nothing dangerous or harmful about the actual emotion itself. There is so much in our environment and our experiences that shape our thoughts, and we can always be afraid and still take action. That would mean we have the presence of courage. Fake it until we make it. So. What you need to notice in your life when going forward is the fear itself, which might be a small problem, but the fear of feeling the emotion is a much bigger problem. Because of this, you might be living consequences of a mediocre life, a life that is way below the level of your capabilities and opportunities. So we hold ourselves back from being alive, from going toward success, because of our fear, of this emotion. Our job as a conscious human being is to understand when it is needed and when it is irrational.

Speaker 1: 14:54

I recommend that you start by writing down whatever it is that you're afraid of, and you can call it a fear sheet. Now, the magic of this piece of paper, which, very cleverly, you're going to call the fear sheet, is that you're going to sit down and write everything that you're afraid of, everything you're avoiding actions around because of this fear. Is it a fear of gaining weight? Is it a fear of getting fired? Is it a fear of getting yelled at by your parents? Is it a fear that you'll never be able to get married and find a spouse? Is it a fear of not being able to lower your gaze? Is it a fear that you'll get sucked into a Netflix binge every time you turn the TV on? Take a piece of paper and write all of these fears down.

Speaker 1: 15:32

In this fear sheet. You're bringing to life what you're actually afraid of, because otherwise these fears will continue to subconsciously run actions in your life. Becoming aware of them is your best opportunity, because this is the case where you've brought your fears into physical matter. Then you can apply your higher level of thinking, your power of observation, to these fears and really ask yourself what is it that these fears are doing for me? How are these fears against me? How can I turn this energy around in my favor and create courage Secretly between you and me?

Speaker 1: 16:06

When you're making this fear sheet, what you're actually doing is making a list of your thoughts, also known as the thought output, which is something we practice in my EMW program. So this fear sheet will reveal your thoughts to you where you are creating fear. Then you can decide if you want to deliberately oppose those thoughts or if you want to continue to adopt them. This is a powerful way to find courage through your fear. With that, I pray to Allah swt that our fears be properly placed in Him only. I pray that we don't remain afraid of our emotions. I ask Allah swt that he makes a nation of strong, experiential beings in the Muslim Arma. I ask Allah that we are constantly using our qalb to direct our actions that are pleasing to Allah. I make Dora for everyone listening or anyone coming in contact with my Merc, that these tools make their life easy in this world and the next. I pray for your prosperity and serenity and courage through your fears. Please keep me in your Dora's. I will talk to you guys next time.