Overcoming Fear And Reaching Your Potential - Mental Health 1/7
As-salam alaykum. I'm Berak Hussain, the Muslim counselor. Why do we get stuck? Why is it so hard to face our worst fears? What is preventing us from reaching our full absolute potential? I see this all the time within myself, within my friends, and especially my clients. They come in because they are afraid of perhaps travel, perhaps getting into the graduate school that they want to get into, or meeting the right people, or even finding the right partner. What is it about these fears that stop us from getting there?
Well, you don't know until you try. People are afraid of failure, perhaps. And that will then have an effect on our self-esteem. If you cannot reach the goal that you have in mind, then you feel you are a failure to yourself, to your family, and your friends. And that in turn, will lead to all sorts of challenges from reaching your full potential. So what can we do? Like I said earlier, actually look at facing your fears. What is it that is stopping you and preventing you from actually getting there? So what can we do about it?
There are two neat tricks, therapeutic tricks, that you can apply in your daily lives. Dr. Burns, who is known as the anxiety expert, presents this idea, which is the "then what?" strategy. Let's say, for example, you are afraid of judgment. You are afraid of what people think of you, about the way you dress, the way you speak, or how you present yourself. So judgment. Let's put it up here and say, then what? Then you break it down. So people are afraid of you, or you are afraid rather of what people are going to think about you. Then what? Is that so bad? No, not really. Or it could be. Then you go deeper. Is that so bad? Break it down further. Is that so bad? Go all the way down. Then what? Then what? Then you get down to the root of the issue. And you will most of the time find that it is not that significant. Not at all. It is your own fear and your own thought that you put into your own head rather than other people's, that prevents you from reaching your full potential.
Another strategy is the five-minute rule, and this is something that is well-known in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is activating our thoughts to get the type of behavior that we want or get rid of a bad behavior. So, the five-minute rule to help you work through a fear or get over a fear is setting a goal for yourself of, I am going to do this task for five minutes, whatever it may be. Set the timer, start the task. The timer goes off and you ask yourself, can I continue doing this? Yes? Keep going. If you cannot, leave it, put it aside, pat yourself on the back, you have accomplished what you wanted to do, which was to do this for five minutes. Of course, you have to come back later, and start it again, and hopefully that will kick off and you can continue.
So, these are small strategies that you can apply in your daily lives to help you work through your own fears, your insecurities, because essentially it is yourself, not other people, that are preventing you from reaching your full potential. Again, it is about that balance, that self-care, that self-love, not letting negative influences overtake you to reach your full potential. As-salam alaykum.
