Fear is Not the Best Motivator.

Recently, I was having a discussion with a client who is FINALLY learning how to escape fear and live from a place of inner peace and self-love after a lifetime’s worth of being stuck in a desperate fight-or-flight mode. It’s beautiful to see.

In our discussion, she commented how—until now—she had been using that fear to motivate her and that fear has, in fact, been the driving force in her success (and she is, indeed, very successful).

So, we started talking about how fear helps us and what its limitations are, and here is some of what I pointed out to her:

I definitely get that fear has helped you in these ways in the past, but you know that shifting away from fear will lead you to even greater success moving forward.

Imagine that you had a car where the brake pedal was stuck down, so the brakes were always on. The only way to get the car to move at the speed you wanted was to put in a stronger engine and keep it revving at max capacity all the time. The brake pedal is the lack of self-love.

The max revving of the engine is the fear. When the brake pedal is stuck, the fear has been the way that you kept yourself moving towards progress. It was essential. But an even easier way to attain the same speeds would be to just release the brake pedal.

And soon, you'll have the best of both worlds! You'll have a huge engine (your drive and motivation) and you'll release the brake pedal, so you can stop pushing the engine to its limits (let go of the fear) and attain even higher speeds than you ever had before.

Or…

Let's expand the metaphor a bit. Imagine the car is parked on a hill, facing downhill. The lack of self-love, self-care, and self-assurance is you having the parking brake on.

And because the parking brake is on, the car isn't moving, and you need to slam on the gas and rev the motor to get the car moving.

And so far... It's worked. It has gotten you moving and has moved you down the road. It has been a relatively successful strategy.

I mean... It's also been creating a lot of smoke and burning your brake pads (it has been creating unhealthy relationship dynamics and personal struggles of various kinds). But it's worked.

So, fear has kept you moving, but it's also created other problems.

Now, if we simply took the parking brake off (if we learned to develop real self-love), then the car would roll down the hill on its own. You could achieve the same speed that you had with fear with little to no effort.

You could keep achieving the same level of success without the need for all of the muss and fuss that using fear as your motivator has caused. The drive will be smoother and easier and more enjoyable, and you'll be able to start moving much faster than you had before.

Or…

To simplify this further, what I’m saying is…

Yes…

Fear works as a motivator... But it takes a lot more energy and creates a lot of friction and other problems along the way. And in the long run, it won't get you as far as using healthy self-love to drive yourself. Especially in a career where your mission is to guide and help others. ❤️

Fear is an effective motivator. But it’s not the most effective and certainly not the healthiest.

Plus, it can only work in certain areas of your life.

You might be able to build a successful career around fear, but you’ll never build healthy relationships around it.

So, it’s very important to move past it and to shift to using self-love as our driving force.