The Risk of Fear

Do you know what the worst part has been about finally starting to feel your feelings? As I have begun to uncover the layers and layers of protection that I have applied over the years, I’ve been forced to face my fears. There are so many things I have been avoiding confronting but peeling back the layers has made it harder to ignore them.

In my day job, one of the jobs I enjoyed the most was that of a Fraud Analyst within the Risk Department of a lending company. There, I learned about the following matrix (slightly adapted by me to make it more relevant to this conversation...):

I would like to propose that we have the same 4 options when it comes to how we deal with our fears:

• We can avoid them – such as taking a different route to avoid the neighbourhood dog that scares us.

• We can mitigate them – by doing things to reduce the probability of it happening – such as not going up to the top of the CN Tower if we have a fear of heights.

• We can accept the risk – know that they may happen and be okay with that – like getting on a plane even though we are afraid it might crash – this usually happens when the benefit of facing the fear is higher than the severity of the fear.

• We can transfer the risk – for example asking someone else to do it for us – such as asking our partner to get rid of the spider.

Does this make sense to you? I would love to know your thoughts….