When you face your fear, most of the time you will discover that it was not really such a big threat after all.
What Les Brown captures here isn't the banal idea that fears shrink when examined, but rather something more precise: the gap between the *imagined* threat and the *actual* one. Our minds are exceptional at constructing disasters that evaporate the moment we turn to face them—the difficult conversation you've rehearsed a hundred ways, the rejection you're certain awaits. When a parent finally asks their teenager about the failing grade instead of avoiding it, they often find confusion rather than defiance, a problem to solve rather than a character flaw to mourn. The real work, then, isn't conquering some fierce internal beast but simply closing the distance between what we fear and what is.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca