Have you ever noticed that when you are afraid something will happen, it often does? You fear that you will blush when people look at you—and then you do. You fear you’ll trip, and suddenly your legs feel heavy. You fear you’ll say something silly, and the words come out wrong.
This happens because fear makes your body react. When you are afraid, your heart beats faster, your breathing changes, and you become tense. Your mind focuses so much on what you fear that your body ends up doing it. In other words, fear helps to create the very thing you are afraid of. That’s why we say “the fear is mother of the event.”
The more you fight your fear, the stronger it becomes. But when you accept it, it starts to lose power. If you say to yourself, “It’s okay if I blush” or “It’s fine if I make a mistake,” your body begins to relax. And when you relax, what you feared often doesn’t happen at all.
So next time you are nervous about something, try not to resist the feeling. Take a breath. Let the fear be there, but don’t let it control you. When you stop fighting fear, you stop feeding it—and that’s when you take back your calm.