Find your fire: A creative and vulnerable way to overcome your greatest fears

Your mind's most magical secret – how to overcome limiting stories

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If your fear of, say, failure, humiliation or public speaking stops you from taking the opportunities you really want to take, then this is for you.

After avoiding it for as long as possible, I found myself with four weeks to both write my talk and find a way through my fear. This little series is about how I did this. In the first article, we covered the practicalities of preparation. Now, we're moving onto something altogether different: how your memories can provide a way to change your automatic emotional reaction to pretty much anything you find frightening, but wish you didn't.

The example I'm using is my old fear of public speaking, but you could apply this little process to other kinds of unhelpful fear as well. If you're up for giving it a go, here's how.

The hidden magic of memory

Making sure you focus on something you feel comfortable to explore, start by taking a moment to connect with a limiting fear or block that you struggle with. The idea is to feel your fear right now, even if on a very low level. If it's too much, stop. But if you get a little uncomfortable – a little taste of the fear – then that's great.

So, if you're afraid of dogs, for example, you could imagine there's a dog barking outside or right there in the room with you. As you picture it, just let your body remember the type of fear you feel in the presence of a dog.

Or, if you're afraid of something like public speaking, you can simply imagine that you're standing on a stage in front of a thousand people. That should do the trick.

Now, once you’re connected to that feeling of fear, I'd like you to cast your mind back over your life to see which memories feel related to it, especially from your formative years. Did your uncle Terry have a scary pitbull when you were younger? Did you fall over in the school nativity play at six-years-old? No matter how easy it might be to rationalise our childhood challenges away as adults, if we have memories that link certain stimuli (like dogs or public speaking) to strong fear-based emotions, then these memories will very likely play a role in our present-day emotional reactions.

When I first started thinking along these lines before my debut talk, I asked myself: "When else have I felt this particular brand of anxiety?"

My mind was awash with associations. But one memory stood out: I was about seven and – roll out the red carpet – performing in a primary school production of Cinderella. When the big moment came, though, I completely forgot to say my one and only line. There was an excruciating silence while everyone waited. I waited, too. I even looked around to see who had made this awful error. Then, with a horrible sinking feeling, I realised that it was my fault the play had ground to a halt. Too embarrassed to pipe up, I stayed schtum and let the play continue while I panicked about letting people down and getting told off.

Significant emotional events

As an adult, that doesn't sound like that big a deal but as a kid it was huge, and so were the emotions that came with it. This is the important thing here: that this moment sprang to mind when I thought about public speaking as an adult meant that there was a good chance my unconscious mind was anticipating something similar for my upcoming talk. In other words, a part of me was probably expecting to feel like a six-year-old with absolutely no idea what to say on stage in front of hundreds of let-down people. No wonder I was nervous.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this memory was necessarily the singular "root" of my public speaking phobia. I'm not sure it's even possible to work out what that might be.

Categorisation

Categorisation is a cognitive process that involves sorting objects, ideas, or events into groups or categories in order to organise knowledge and make sense of the world. It's a central part of human cognition and is critical for survival.

But one of the ways our brains understand the world is by lumping things into categories. We think: this thing is like that thing, so I can expect something similar from it. For example, we don't need to work out what to do with a chair whenever we come across a new one. It's in the chair category, so we sit down.

In fact, we know we can sit down on anything that looks even vaguely chair-like – a bollard, a boulder, someone down on all fours searching for their pen lid, etc. This is because categories generalise as we accumulate experiences of the world.

With chairs, generalisation probably isn't such an issue, but with phobias and anxiety it can be a problem because it can cause a very specific and realistic fear to grow into what feels like a big irrational block.

Perhaps we were once okay with dogs in general but afraid of Uncle Terry's pitbull because it barked loudly and once took a nibble of our hand while we tried to eat dinner. Over time, as we notice other dogs barking and looking interested in our food, the original fear can start to spread until anything dog-shaped – even the tiniest, friendliest little chihuahua – can set our heart pounding.

If my mind was doing something similar with my Cinderella memory, then it would make sense that my emotions felt a little over-the-top. Fortunately, this memory also offered me a way to reroute that energy.

Memories as stories

Memories function like stories that, when activated, play out automatically in our unconscious awareness. The purpose of this is to provoke what the mind believes to be an appropriate reaction (in this case, fear). With well-established patterns like my public speaking phobia, unless we do something to break the pattern, the reaction is unlikely to change.

But the good news is that these stories are not set in stone because memories evolve and change as we grow. Memory is in fact really unreliable as a record of reality – even things that we would swear until we were blue in the face had happened as we remember most probably didn't happen that way at all.

Check this out. In one study, conducted in 1986, researchers interviewed people the day after the Challenger space shuttle exploded mid-flight. Details recorded included how the interviewees heard the news, how they felt about it, and what they had been doing at the moment they learned of the disaster. However, when those same people were interviewed again two and a half years later, a quarter of them had misremembered every detail and not a single person told consistent stories in the two interviews. I don't know about you, but that blew my mind. Even flashbulb memories – those super detailed, clear recollections we have of big events – appear to shift and change without us knowing; they seem to be malleable, not set.

This is known as the plasticity of memory.

In a practical sense, what this means is that we can intentionally edit and rewrite memories that are in problematic categories in order to teach the mind to see things of that kind differently. I used to do this type of work often with my therapy clients, and I found that young memories were by far the most effective. My guess is that this is because they usually involve big emotions, and also because we are better at forgiving, empathising with, and accepting our child selves after making a boo-boo than we are our adult selves.

So, my Cinderella memory was perfect rewriting fodder for my limiting public-speaking story, and because it wasn't a serious, traumatic experience, the reframe was remarkably easy.

Note: Although this technique can be used to help people with more serious experiences, I wouldn't recommend tackling trauma without the help or guidance of a therapist or doctor.

How to retell a limiting story

To change my story, I imagined going back to that day and speaking compassionately with my younger self. I explained that it was okay to make mistakes and that no one was angry. Then, I encouraged her to say her line even though she was late. This took a little effort. My brain really didn't seem to like that idea, but I got there in the end, and when my child self finally spoke, I imagined her glowing. Literally. I saw beams of golden light flooding out of her body and into the crowd of parents (including my own), who were all very grateful to receive it, along with the line, which was, I think, "She's not even wearing any shoes." There, I finally said it to an audience.

This reframed version of the story felt like a much better fit with my adult perspective on what it means to perform. I didn't want to feel like the center of attention for my talk. I'd rather feel like the audience were at the centre of mine and as if I was giving them a gift (should they choose to accept it).

Create an enduring visualisation

This felt right. And freeing, too. So, to help my mind store the memory in this new and better way, I visualised it repeatedly before the event. I imagined my little self saying her line and glowing with that golden light while drifting off to sleep or taking a shower, and I found that the light put my mind at ease every time because it helped me remember that the speaking event just wasn't all about me. Hallelujah.

How can you retell your limiting stories?

If you thought of a related memory when I posed that question earlier, and if you feel comfortable to delve in, see if you can do the same. There's no right or wrong way to reframe a memory. Any edit you apply to a difficult recollection that makes you feel better can start to chip away at the old pattern and sow seeds for some more helpful associations. I would recommend taking a compassionate approach but other than that, nothing's off the table, really, and only you can know what's going to make a difference. If you give this a try, I would dearly love to know how you get on.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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