Owning Leads to Freedom - Step 3

This week I am going to talk about Step 3 in my 5-Step process of overcoming and learning from your fears.  Step 2 was about accepting the emotion without judging it; this step is about taking ownership of the fear. 

It may sound funny however assuming responsibility for your fear is very empowering – it puts you in the driver’s seat.  If you don’t own it, you don’t have the power to transform it.  The more you own it, the more powerful you become.  ‘I created the fear’, also means ‘I can choose to think another way and create different emotions’. Blaming others, parents, doctors etc. is giving away your power.

Importantly, this step is not about blaming yourself, being hard on yourself or feeling guilty about creating fears. It is really about bringing more awareness to your process of generating thoughts so that you can get off autopilot and let go of the feeling and the belief that fears are automatically generated without you having any say in the matter. 

A quote I love from Eckhart Tolle – A New Earth:

• Awareness is the greatest agent of change.

If you practice these first three steps with your fears, you will notice that the fears lose their grip on you and that a gap gradually starts to appear between events and your reaction. In this gap you can start to choose how you want to respond thus opening the door to more confidence and greater freedom!