7 Tips to Decode Fear & Boost Confidence

As part of Stream 1 Quantum Coaching, we invite you to clarify your ideal situation on many levels. To notice you are not yet realizing all aspects of this dream or not yet living "the ideal life," points to possible unconscious fear that may explain self-sabotage, resistance, control, or conditioned judgment.  If you are very honest and feel held back from living fully, as if something unseen prevents you, then now is the time to address a few things.  Reflect on 7 Tips to decode fear and boost confidence to create the best version of you:

 1: Explore possible fears

This prospect of exploring deeper reasons for fears may evoke discomfort, but its necessary for self-mastery. You can’t master a fear that is hidden in your subconscious. You must face it. As you face a person, you see features more clearly, identify traits and behaviours. Similarly, as you explore your fears, you notice things you missed before. This awareness helps you reclaim power that you may have unconsciously given away.

To face your fears and anxiety, keeping a day or dream journal can assist. Record observations, palpable or visceral sensations and behaviour patterns. Do your hands go clammy and muscles clench as perform regular tasks? Do you feel more anxious at different times of day, in certain places or during specific weather? What do you tend to do when fears arise? Write whatever feels significant. Transferring your fear patterns and symptoms into writing or pictures deflates their power and helps demystify them. They are no longer as intimidating.

2: Address smaller fears first

You may discover more than one kind of fear-based pattern in yourself.  To get a handle on this, it helps to break the situation down into fragments. Focusing on each apparent fear individually reveals how to respond in empowering ways.  For example, if it appears that you fear taking more responsibility in your life and some life areas seem scarier or more daunting than others, making systematic changes in small steps can be more manageable than undertaking a lot of changes or bigger ones altogether.  If procrastination and tidiness seems an issue, then appraoch this one room of your house at a time. As confidence builds, you'll find you naturally work faster, make more changes that feel right intuitively without thinking.  The thinking itself points to fear that invites addressing. 

3: Consciously engage the Imagination 

Imagination gives you power, creativity, and ability to see a wider view. If fuelled by fear, an active imagination can focus attention on the negative, magnify illusion. However, you can purposely use it to see through fear.

How do engage more consciously? Pinpoint a calm moment when you are relaxed. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a situation that repeatedly evokes fear. For instance, if you are afraid of being lost in a crowd, picture yourself in a crowded place. Now, imagine yourself handling the situation peacefully. You don’t freeze and begin to cry. Instead, you search for signs that will help you regain your sense of control over your life and direction. Imagine how it feels to find your car easily in a huge parking lot, to unlock your car door, and drive safely home.  The peace felt in your imagined scenario can help you manage the actual ordeal more peacefully.

4: Activate different areas of the Brain 

Your fear and anxiety arise out of a certain part of your brain, and they allow emotion to overcome rational thought. When you feel your fearful symptoms coming forth, engage a different part of your brain. Reflect on numbers, for instance. Before and after breathwork workshops, we ask participants to rate their pain and emotions on a scale of 1-10. Use this scale for your fear. How anxious are you when 1 is perfectly calm and 10 is your very worst symptom? Stop and analyze. Whatever your answer, you can work on lowering that. 

5: Focus on Your Breathing

Breathing is a powerful healing tool. Every emotion can be linked to a particular frequency, breathing pattern and rhythm. Anxiety is often noticable due to short breaths. The short breaths precipitate negative reactions in your body which can escalate. The key to overcoming those is to consciously control your breathing.

Many useful breathing techniques exist. For instance, deep breathing is simple. As you recognize fear arising, stop and focus on your breath. Take a breath in, and then slowly let it out. Ensure your exhale is longer than your inhale. This isn’t just some psychological trick; deep breathing forces your body to physically calm itself.

6: Practice Mindfulness

You may hear about mindfulness, but what is it? A passive thinking activity. It allows you to grow more aware of your fear. The earlier you grow aware of fearful signs and symptoms, the easier it is to overcome your fear.

Practice these mindfulness tips during some of your less severe times of fear and anxiety. As you recognize your fear symptoms arising, sit down and reflect oon what is happening to you. This is like making a mental journal entry. Simply observe symptoms as they arise. Sit and keep track of yourself as the moment continues. Being passive or calmly abiding, raises your self-awareness, and it prevents you from doing the typical things you do when you experience fear. It helps get you break patterns.

7: Immmerse in Nature 

Many approaches exist to work through your fears and anxiety. Talk therapy can be useful.  Creating regular spiritual practices reveals that to truly heal you must feel. Breathwork, yoga, somatic therapy all help you make the unconscious conscious.  Benefits are reinforced in Nature. Walking outside shifts your energy into balance. Natural beauty found in parks, backyards, or wherever something green is growing does help reduce symptoms of fear and anxiety. Nature calms people, reducing stress levels and changing moods from anxious to relaxed. Plus, the physical activity of moving outdoors requires us to use our brains differently, which can cause a switch from irrational fearful thoughts to clearer more engaged heart-mind & brain activity that helps dissolve fear.

Usher in a new way of life

Notice that in order to usher in a new way of life, we must be willing to consciously activate the alchemist within. This is about cherishing and recognizing symbolic sunrises and sunsets in our lives. This implies not only thinking, speaking or writing about things we desire or wish to shift out of our lives, but also putting this thought energy, heartfelt intuition and self-love into action. Every decisions and life choice is a powerful energetic imprint. When ready, we physically, emotionally and otherwise let go of self-created illusions, codependence and other dysfunctional patterns and attachment we adopt to maintain false identity and block true being. We may want to detach or distance ourselves from people or situations because this causes pain, while the idea to which we are attached does not. But to really understand this whole issue of attachment, to tradition, to nationality, to custom, to a habit, to knowledge, to opinion, to a saviour, to all the innumerable beliefs and non-beliefs of 'right and wrong', we must not be satisfied merely to scratch the surface and think we have understood attachment issues when we are cultivating detachment. Whereas if we do not try to cultivate detachment, (which only becomes another issue), if we can simply see attachment clearly, then perhaps we can delve deeper and discover something entirely different, which is neither attachment nor detachment. It dawns that where attachment exists, no love exists. Attachment is the outcome of fear, of various forms of loneliness, and emptiness. An alchemist discovers the field of non-judgement and universal love through letting go of the unreal and being true to a compassionate inner voice. We refresh and renew simply by tuning in and listening to the Highest Self.

Reclaim True Power

Notice as the nature of immortality is consciously remembered, conditioned fears about death and external attempts to control our DNA technology fall away. As we bravely take full and complete responsibility for all our beliefs and perceptions, it dawns we live the life we create and accept energetically. To recognize we are Infinite Beings with Source consciousness that exists beyond drama and linear time, is to know Soul enters body after body, to experience divisions into gender, creed, ethnicities, nations, adopt prejudices, reject Self and heal trauma. We die over and over in mind as we let go of self-created illusions. As True Nature reveals itself, illusions are replaced by Universal Love and a sacred geometric reality of light. As we lose ourselves, we see everything else that is here.

13 Benefits of facing your inner shadows

The inner shadow can be viewed as aspects of our true self we come to reject.  We resist these parts of our personality and do not allow ourselves to see them. When we, as children, internalize messages in our subconscious, they can take shape in adult life as emotional triggers. We may tell ourselves we do not know why we react as we do. Yet, a hidden part does know. We often make choices out of fear.

For instance, if one of your shadows formed around speaking your truth, when people around you speak openly and honestly, this may evoke restlessness, resentment, even terror. You may feel threatened but unclear as to why, and disregard the emotions and discomfort.

Upon deeper self-reflection, hiding your feelings may be an unconscious strategy to avoid suffering. It may point to a fear of safety or survival. This may cause you to stop speaking up, to decide your feelings are unimportant, that you are unlovable, invisible or flawed. Such misperceptions arise from denying shadows.

Consider 13 Benefits of facing your shadows:

1. Grow aware of your triggers

Noticing triggers is a step to joining the dots between your thoughts, feelings. They offer clues to where a sense of  wholeness is fractured. They remind us that it is our thoughts about the way things should be that make our lives difficult or uncomfortable.  People we encounter will continue to press our buttons until we realize what it is we do not wish to know about ourselves, yet.  They guide us to our source of freedom.  Any situation that evokes discomfort is what we seek, an entrance into a lost or unseen part of ourselves.

2. Re-activate your feeling centres

Many people have lost touch with their inner truth. They forget what it feels like. You may be conditioned to doubt or second guess true feelings. When taught to favor the left brain hemisphere, we favor the logical, rational role modelling or social beliefs and behaviours we have been given. We may downplay or devalue our right brain and creative capacities or "other ways of seeing" outside the conditioned comfort zone. This may relate to society's ideas of which life decisions "are best for us." Left-brain ideas are ego-based. Focusing on external advice or ignoring signs and signals of our bodies loses touch with the feeling truth or inner harmony unrelated to ego.

3. Stop being overly optimistic

Being overly optimistic suggests we are missing part of the bigger picture. When we only see the good, we reject aspects of self. Sometimes we are taught to be overly positive and avoid the negative.  Avoidance is a defense mechanism and reveals something is missed. As you notice a tendency to favor the positive, shadow-work is useful.  Ignoring things increases their density. Look at recurrent nightmares. What we resist, persists to invite us to make the unconscious, conscious.  Manifestations of what you reject grow stronger. If you resist your dark side, it grow more solid, takes shape in ways you cannot ignore.

4. Realize you could be right, or could be free

As you explore deeper reasons for anger and fear, this can trigger moments of awakening that lead to greater authenticity, creativity, and emotional freedom. Finding pleasure in the way things are, rather than the way you think they should be, inspires others to act in ways that surprise us. being open to deeper insight into yourself accelerates self- growth.

5. Let go of desires for love, approval & appreciation

As we disconnect from feeling centres and subtle senses, this is like overriding our inner knowing.  As we face the sense of conflict that arises, we begin to recognize that any desires we hold are unnecessary.  That is, we are what we are seeeking. This is the beginning of letting go of desire for love, approval and appreciation because it dawns we are never missing anything.

6. Recognize spiritual bypassing

In the case that we justify going against our feelings by saying "this is an exercise in uncondicional love & forgiveness," this may turn out to be a case of spiritual bypassing (SB).  SB is  is like any other form of avoidance that rewards us with a false feeling of security and happiness, while undermining our deeper path of self-growth and transformation. John Welwood coined the term, 'spiritual bypassing' to mean: "the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks." Making the unconscious conscious is part of spiritual integration.

7. Integrate heart and soul

Bringing uncomfortable issues to the surface is helping to realize that emotions only have a hold over us when we allow it. Timeless practices such as meditation, mantras, sacred geometry, journalling, automatic writing, dream journalling and immersing in nature help us to integrate the deepest desires of the heart and soul. This draws our attention to any illusions of separaton we perpetuate in thought, word and deed.

8.  Rebuild inner trust

Imagine the case where you befriend someone and they seem like one type of person and then later reveal they behave in ways that make you feel uncomfortable. If you trust your feelings, and are true to yourself, that friendship may diminish or disappear from your life. Whereas if you go against your inner compass, you are eroding the trust you have in yourself.  

9. Strengthen listening 

In life, there may be occasions where you feel unheard or ignored by people at work, in family or even in passing.  Being aware of feeling ignored is tuning into deeper  reasons and buried feelings of resentment and sadness about being devalued.  As you live more based on feelings, your being feels more heard and the external world reflects this back.

10. Sharpen intuition

Intuition is the language of the soul, your essence.  Living fully requires tuning in and living soely based on intuition without over-riding our inner knowing.

11. Jumpstart self-rediscovery 

Until deep self-reflection happens, you may spend a great deal of time researching, creating or changing a sense of purpose and not really feel a sense of lasting clarity or direction. Purpose may simply be related to  skills or experience you seem to have and overlook internal cues. Self-discovery only happens when you are tuned into your feelings. 

12. Unleash inner genius

To become the best version of you, and truly free of what holds this back from realizing inner genius, the path involves uncovering and integrating your inner shadow aspects. They undermine your transformation into into the physical. Call if your soul's destiny or whatever you like.  The most authentic version of you already exists but it is up to you to take steps to experience transfiguration. Every being has a unique path.

13. Accept yourself fully

Accepting who you are at the core involves living in alignment. Every journey to complete self-love is unique. Some paths can involve soul retrieval.  The key is to walk the Path and know situations that present only change from the moment we have learned and integrated what those energies or lessons have to teach us. Accepting yourself fully allows you to turn inward and experience the peace that already exists within.  That peace is immovable, unmoving, ever-present.

Contact us to explore shadow-work on a whole new level

Challenge Yourself

Challenge yourself to  determine what would enable you to feel most alive and what prevents you from living this.  Breathe into your purest intentions. Identify the nature of your emotional triggers. Make a list of what stands out, which events, thoughts or actions cause you to cringe, or withdraw? Which individuals or situations evoke discomfort? To help turn things around, what would you ideally be doing or how would you ideally be functionning? What would the ideal breath look and feel like? Ask yourself to describe what affects your breath. 

What if you could come to tune into the rhythm breath and use it as a pointer to help you work through and heal these triggers? Now is the perfect moment to follow intuition...