Have you ever been in a situation where you were prepared for the worst to happen? Your mind ran wild with terrible imaginings and you were literally paralysed by fear! Soon the feared event happened! Yet when you eventually passed through the actual experience you realised that the fear you had was much worse than the actual event!

Most of us have had such experiences.

On the other hand have you ever feared the worst and it didn't happen?

In both the above situations you probably worked yourself into a frenzy in anticipation of this terrible thing that was about to happen only to find out later that your fears were unfounded. Did you find that the actual experience was not nearly as bad as the fear you initially had.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933.

So what is fear and how do we defeat it?

Fear is the result of negative mental programming. Fear enters your mind when your automatic thinking is negative. It rears its ugly head when you find yourself out of your comfort zone! It is the unknown outcome that produces fear in any situation and the collection of many thoughts that direct your consciousness to the worst possible scenario.

Fear is false!

If you look closely at your fears you will find that the great majority of them never come to pass and those that do are not as bad as you expected them to be.

The key to conquering fear lies in your thinking and questioning. In future when you are confronted with a fear you should stop for a moment and take a very deep breath. Breathing deeply relaxes the body and removes the tension that the fear is creating in your body. Then look closely at the way you have just been thinking. You will find that your mind was filled with the worst possible images connected to your fear.

Reverse the thoughts! Begin by questioning the fear. Use the following four questions to paralyse the fear!

1. Is your feared based in reality?

2. If this fear were to come to pass and be manifested in your life would the experience really be as bad as you are imagining it would be?

3. Is it possible that you may actually gain something from experiencing the feared event?

This last question may sound like a strange thing to ask yourself but there is a two-fold reason for asking it. Firstly, any thought in a different direction breaks the runaway train of negative fearful thought! Secondly, it forces you to look at the fear from a different perspective and neutralizes its power.

4. Is it possible that if I change my thinking now I can actually create what I want instead of being fearful?

When we change how we think we change how we act. A great majority of people who experience the things that they have feared for a long time have actually brought about the feared event themselves because they have constantly focused on their fears. By focusing on your fears you tend to act in ways that are connected to the fears and thus you unconsciously create the feared event. An example would be a person who fears they will lose their partner. They therefore try to control them in every way in order to ensure the person will never leave them. Can you see how trying to do this will actually create the reverse effect and push the person away. Yet to them they are ensuring they keep the person! Everyone of us acts in this way everyday - we outwardly attract our fears through our actions due to our focus.

Likewise, when we hold in mind the expectation that we will receive what we want to receive our thinking affects our actions and we find ourselves attracting the very things we want.

So to avoid attracting situations and people that will help you manifest your own fears constantly ask yourself the four fear-busting questions above. You will soon find that your fears are only shadows with no real substance and you will begin to move forward in the direction you want.