5 Ways to Make Fear Work For You

We’ve all been told that fear is a bad thing. It makes us weak. It makes us insecure. It keeps us from achieving our goals.

But what if everything we think we know about fear is wrong?

Kristen Ulmer knows fear intimately. One of the best extreme skiers in the world for 12 years, she has had to overcome it, push past it, and ignore it as she jumped from 70-foot cliffs and performed midair flips. Most importantly, though, somewhere along the way, she learned to make her fear work for her, and today, she teaches that skill to groups and individuals, and has distilled her wisdom into her new book, “The Art of Fear: Why Conquering Fear Won't Work and What to Do Instead.”

Rather than seeing fear as something inherently negative, Ulmer writes that we should give it a place of honor. It’s merely one of the many voices that speak to us every day, alongside things like gratitude, love, and joy. Fear, according to Ulmer, is a natural part of our humanity that we can learn to harness through a teaching tool called Shift.

With that simple change of perspective, you can learn not to conquer fear, but to use it. To help you do that, let’s take a journey through Ulmer’s book and talk about 6 ways you can make fear work for you.

Change Your Perspective

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The first step toward making fear work for you is to fundamentally change the way you see this emotion—it is from this change that all else will flow.

We often consider fear to be our enemy. We want to repress it, fight it, and destroy it. But the fact is that fear is an invincible enemy—when we hit it, it hits us back twice as hard.

Instead of fighting fear, writes Ulmer, we should be making friends with it. She names fear as merely “1 of 10,000” voices within your mind that are all competing for your attention—it’s a natural part of us that isn’t going away.

So instead of operating from the mindset that we need to “conquer” fear, we must learn to live with it.

Your fear, as Ulmer says, will not be denied. And when you try to deny or avoid it, as we’re about to see, it bursts forth in some very unhealthy ways.

Stop Avoiding

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Once you shift your perspective, it’s time to take action. You’re going to stop avoiding fear.

Ulmer writes that repressed and avoided fear will ruin your life, and will usually act out in in one of two ways: it will explode in a wave of irrational, loud, whiny, or moody behavior, or it will come out in more subtle ways, such as difficulty sleeping or an increasingly negative self-image.

Constant negativity is a huge sign that you’re keeping your fears at arms-length. Ulmer writes that “Much like how red, yellow, and blue—our primary colors—form the basis of the entire color spectrum, we also have primary emotions: Anger, Sadness, Joy, the Erotic, and, of course, Fear. Together, these are the emotions from which all your human experience is created.”

Repressed fear blackens the hue of your entire life, changing your confidence to unworthiness and your happiness into guilt and depression. It is the source of the dark voices in your life.

But when you stop avoiding fear and start treating it with kindness, you’ll have a much easier time rising up out of negativity. Let’s look at how you can do that.

Identify the Problem

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You may have changed your mind about fear, and you may be ready to face it, but you can’t do that until you figure out exactly where it’s coming from.

Many of us feel anxious without knowing why. Or we lash out in anger at the smallest provocations. Or maybe we just feel numb. When emotions are generalized like this, it can be difficult to find the source.

To do this, you need to examine the patterns in your life—the things that you do automatically and without thinking. Are you spending too much time at work simply because that’s how you’ve always done things? It could be because of a fear of losing that job, compounded by the stress of being overworked.

Examine your beliefs. Which of your beliefs involve something negative happening to you. To continue using the above example, do you believe that “My life will be over if I lose my job,” or that your family will no longer respect you if you don’t get that next big promotion?

Each of us, according to Ulmer, has the tendency to get stuck within a cage of our own beliefs. Figure out which of these beliefs correlate with reality, and which are merely fearful conjecture, and you’ll have taken a big step toward identifying the sources of fear in your life.

Make the Shift

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Now, it’s time to go from allowing fear to hold you back to using it to propel yourself forward. And to do this, you’re going to have to have an intimate conversation with your fear.

“Being willing to sit in a room together,” writes Ulmer, “is the first step you take to end a strained relationship with anyone, be it a lover, parent…or any of your 10,000 voices.” Once you do that, “With good communication, put aside your agenda, show them respect, and apologize.”

It is here that you make the shift from fearing fear to trusting and being curious about fear. Bring it out into the light so that it doesn’t have to work in the darkness. Do this, and it will become an ally and an asset.

For example, if you’re open and honest about your fear, it will speak clearly to you. Gone will be the nebulous anxiety. Instead, you’ll simply feel a healthy, motivating fear that helps you get your work done more quickly, that helps you get that raise. And when you go home at the end of the day, that fear can simply stop—its job is done. It doesn’t have to keep trying to warn you from “the basement,” as Ulmer puts it.

Once you do this, you can move on to the final step—the one that grants true freedom from the chains of fear.

Embrace Not Knowing

Finding freedom in total acceptance of reality is a very Buddhist concept, but one that everyone can benefit from—especially those who struggle with fear. This means not fearing all those things you can’t control, but rather embracing the idea that you cannot truly control anything.

Ulmer writes that, to work with your fear in a healthy way, you must realize that “You don’t’ know who or what you are.” Be willing to enter the discomfort of not knowing. This means letting go of patterns and agendas. This means acknowledging the fact that you’re constantly growing and changing and going on new adventures.

This means you are free.

Releasing the illusion of control is the single greatest action you can take in your quest to make fear work for you. Let it drive you to explore the unknown rather than forcing you to avoid it. Let it excite you. Let it motivate you.

Embrace not knowing. Embrace your freedom.