Fears and Phobias can hold you back in all aspects of your life, in business enterprises and personal endeavors. A serious fear can become a sort of straitjacket, preventing normal movement through life; it can trigger depression, and low self-esteem, as you may blame yourself for being too weak to overcome your fears on your own. Most of all, fear can distort one's view of life, and blind one to life's beauty. When we focus on our fear, the better things in life are blocked from our field of vision.



The fear that's binding you affects not only you, but everyone around you, especially those loved ones closest to you. It can be very painful to see someone you love struggling with an irrational fear that is keeping them from living a normal life. Often, the feelings of helplessness are even more intense among your loved ones; because fear is something internal, and although they can offer words of encouragement, they cannot enter the real field of battle with your fear?your heart and mind.

Ultimately, you must summon the strength to fight it there alone, and conquer it. Because fear is little more than a figment of your imagination. It may have very concrete origins in the real world, such as a traumatic image or a horrible event, which, for whatever reason, became embedded in your subconscious, only to resurface years later, in horrible new incarnations, both in your nightmares and in your waking life. Sometimes, the fear can bear little resemblance to the thing that actually caused it, which can make it hard to trace the origins of your fears. Imagination exaggerates the fear and inflates it to monstrous proportions.

Phobias are a kind of fear that are completely irrational?that is, fears of something which, by any objective standard, are not fearful in and of themselves. Why fear spiders, for example?something you can easily crush with your shoe? And yet, the mere sight of a spider can send some people into hysterics; this is clearly an irrational fear.

Other phobias are ridiculous in other ways. For example, the fear of dogs as a category, in an abstract sense. Now, the fear of a giant pit bull that's gotten out of its leash is a very rational fear! It might make sense to run on such occasions! But of course, truly fearful situations rarely occur. The person who fears dogs in general usually finds himself frozen in his tracks when some stupid poodle approaches him on the sidewalk. This is a completely irrational fear'a phobia. It makes sense to analyze such fears, to seek out some more or less rational basis for them. Perhaps you were chased by a dog as a young child. It doesn't take much to set a phobia in motion.

Sometimes professional help, such as hypnosis, may prove helpful in uncovering the source of your fear, especially when it is a memory buried deep in your past. But ultimately, no professional can force you to confront and conquer your fears and phobias. Overcoming them is merely a question of willpower and determination. No fear can be conquered until it is confronted head-on.