Overcoming Fear with Love, NOT More Fear

By Philip Joks

“Overcoming a fear out of a deeper fear of something else may be the reason that it's not working.” Experiencing Love Ep 123

Hello, and welcome to Experiencing Love. I'm your host, Philip Joks, and I'm so glad that you're here. I had an interesting thought earlier today that I want to explore. I wrote it down in my journal as this: Overcoming a fear out of a deeper fear of something else may be the reason that it's not working. You have to be approaching love, or you have to have the intention of love, to truly overcome a fear. Otherwise, it's still running from a fear.

When I had that thought, it was in the context of obviously overcoming a fear, but specifically, the situation where you may be trying to overcome a fear or you notice a fear in your life that you've had for a while and haven't been able to do something about. And when you try to overcome that fear and it doesn't work, you're in this cycle, you're in this pattern that you don't know where the entrance or the exit is. When I looked at that situation, when I looked at that scenario, and I thought about the times in my life that I've done something like that, I started to question my intentions about what I was trying to do in that scenario. And it may help if I give an example.

I have a history of feeling socially anxious. It's not as bad anymore, but there's still parts that are still there, especially when it comes to approaching a girl that I find really attractive. That's probably the pinnacle. And then there's lesser degrees of other ones. It was always about approaching someone. Once I was in a conversation, I always found it easy. Yet somehow, that first "hi," that first step, the moment of crossing the threshold from the unknown to the known of how is this person going to respond and interact with me? That was always the hardest. And there's been many times in my life that I've tried different techniques, done different exercises in therapy and journaling, done all the steps that I could find, and it still didn't work. I look back on that scenario and I wonder, why didn't it work?

And what I realize is that my intention beneath the idea of overcoming a fear, which I endorse with my heart 100%, I realized I was attempting to overcome a fear with the motivation of running from another fear. So with this example, the first fear, the first layer, is approaching someone and fearing rejection. And the fear I used as motivation to try to overcome that fear was the fear of not being enough, the fear of not feeling loved, the fear of being alone for the rest of my life. I do get strong fears about things like that, things like being alone. I know that I can be alone. I know that I can handle solitude. And there's many times that I prefer it. And at the same time, I don't want that to be forever and I don't want that to be always. Sometimes I like to be alone and sometimes I need to be with other people. And the fear, the deeper rooted, deeper-seated fear, is that one day I won't have that choice. I will just be alone.

So, I use that fear to try to motivate me to overcome the fear of approaching people. I want to be friends with people, people that I find attractive, people that I find intimidating, successful people that I think are at a different level than I am in life. And I would put myself in their shoes and would be wondering why I'm talking to them. Now, logically, I know those aren't true. I know there's a lot of assumptions and false pretenses that just don't make sense. Logically, they don't make sense. But emotionally, well, my emotions are my emotions and they... There's a degree of control I have. It's not always, it's not 100%.

So anyway, I realized that the reason it never worked in the past was because I was using fear as the motivator. When I thought about it, if I use that logic, use a fear to take action on another fear, I realize it could work the opposite way too, which is I can use a fear to not take action on another fear. So while I have the fears that I explained before, there could be a third layer of fear where it is strictly survival, where I think attempting to overcome this fear will cause me physical harm. Now, if I look at it from that perspective, it doesn't matter how afraid I am of being alone in the future, if I fear that I am going to be in physical pain right now. And not just physical pain, but also emotional pain, mental pain, spiritual pain, whatever it is, if I think I'm going to feel all those pains right now and it's threatening my survival, I will not even attempt to overcome my fear. And I think that's what my brain and my body have been doing for the past few months, past few years. I make ground where I can. And yet, I haven't really moved the needle because there's this underlying problem that I'm not solving. Fear is a push motivator. And push motivators are strong, but they don't last. Push motivators are external and as soon as they run out, if you have no other fuel source, you are going to slow down, you are going to stop.

It's cool to have realizations like this, and it's not enough to just stop there. I realized that there needs to be some next step, something different to try. It's not enough to just spot a problem. You also want to find a solution. So the win here is that I found this deeper problem that I never quite acknowledged before, and I found myself a solution. And that's in the premise of this podcast. In order to overcome a fear, you have to do it with the intention of love. You have to do it with the hope of approaching the emotion and the state of being that is love. It's all about experiencing love. Because when I look back at the scenario I shared just before and I switch out the lens for a prescription of love, it changes how I feel about every level. For starters, when I no longer fear some outcome, some undesired outcome about a social interaction, and I'm just focused on love, I no longer look to the other person to give me something. Instead, I step into the conversation looking to give. I'm not looking to get, I'm looking to give some form of love. Maybe that's just my attention, my energy, my time. We all know what it could feel like to not have someone's attention, to not have anybody's attention, and how isolating that is.

If I go deeper and look at the old fuel source, the second layer of fear, the fear of not being loved, the fear of not being enough... When I switch out the perspective, when I switch out the prescription to love, I see that I no longer need anybody to love me. I don't need anybody to tell me that I'm enough. Because from a place of love, I can give that to myself. I can see myself and say, "I love you. You are enough." And only from a place of love will it feel real. If you say these things not feeling love, you're not going to believe it. Things like affirmations, things like incantations, they work—when you're in a state of love, when you're in a beautiful state, a peak state because... Because if you're afraid, maybe of what you're saying or of what the things you are saying implicate, then of course you're not gonna let those things sink in and you're not gonna believe it.

I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I know I make better decisions when I'm coming from love, period. And I don't want love to be confused with just the emotion of love, like falling in love. Even though that's one powerful version of love. When I say love, I... I say it as a state of being. And that state of being is like an umbrella. And underneath that umbrella is every single positive emotion that you can think of, every single emotion that feels good. Fear is the opposite. Fear is the umbrella of all the painful or the scary emotions and experiences you can have. And while I know we may all want to feel the positive emotions, reality has it that we have to experience both. We have to feel both because all of these things are under one umbrella of emotions, of the human experience. And that in order to feel more love, you have to experience fear. And you have to overcome those fears. Because the fears we do not face become our limits. And I want everybody to feel limitless.

Yeah, it may take some work, but that's the point. It's not meant to be easy. If it was easy, we wouldn't appreciate it. So, I know that everything I've said today may not be exactly new. A lot of what I say is me taking the puzzle pieces in my mind and rearranging them in different ways. To me, this is just a different arrangement of the pieces that float around in my mind. And the more I speak about this, and nowadays, the more I write about it, the more I find I act out of these principles. They're not just things I think about, they're things I am. There are things I do. They're creating results in my life that surprise me because I truly am just becoming a different person, a new person. Change is inevitable. Either I create change or life creates it for me. So I just ask, who do I want to be in charge of change? I do these things so that I can change on my time, on my clock. I could change when I want to, in the ways that I want to. Yes, the world gives me challenges, yet I don't let the same challenge get me twice. I have a lot of challenges that look similar, but each time I go up against a challenge, I try something new. And if I have a challenge, the same one over and over again, well, that's just because the last five times my attempts didn't work. And that's okay, because I don't need every attempt to work. I only need it to work once. So I'm going to keep trying.

So, with this overcoming of fear, just remembering to come from a place of love, instead of seeing, "What can I get from this person?" I start asking, "What can I give this person?" That anxiety just melts away because if I approach a new relationship with "What can I give?" and this person doesn't want what I have to give, that doesn't make me any lesser of a person. I could just find someone that wants what I have to give, so that's how I can experience even more of God's love right now, and that's beautiful to me.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being here. I really do hope that you got some value out of this episode. I know for me this is just one more step up this massive mountain. I don't know what's at the peak of this mountain, but I do know that I'm growing a lot in reaching the top. I just hope you can find some wisdom along the way too. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and rest of your weekend. Remember to always fill up with the love, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. I love you.

Crave a deeper dive into the transformative power of choosing love over fear? Listen to the full episode that sparked this enlightening conversation. Experience more insights and moments of revelation with Philip Joks on "Experiencing Love." This Episode On Spotify

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