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.