fear just got more interesting...

My wife Clare, confidently standing on the top of the world aka as San Francisco's Twin Peaks in 2015. One of my favourite pictures of her. She is taking her space!

 I have a wonderfully weird gig coming up in May. I’m talking to a group of women who are focussed on empowering women about public speaking and self-confidence. So it’s an interesting challenge for me to tackle - mansplaining or what? So a part of me is a little scared, not of the public speaking, but of taking that space.  I once appeared in front of a women’s committee at my Student Union in the late Seventies. They were fairly radical feminists and it didn’t go well. I should have been better prepared. I was only 19.

So this Bank holiday weekend I’ve got myself a pile of books on women and confidence and started to make notes.

Tara Mohr’s “Playing Big, A Practical Guide for Brilliant Women Like You” is a great book. What I find compelling isn’t just about women and confidence, because most of what she says also applies to men but she’s really opened my eyes to a “new old” way of thinking about fear.

She writes about how the Hebrew Bible uses two different words for fear. The first is Pachad: this describes the fear of what might happen, the over-reactive irrational fear, which we know as anxiety. Our lizard brain is reacting. Most of us know this fear well.  We want to avoid taking emotional risks. It’s one of the main reasons why people come on my courses.

The second word is “Yirah”and we don’t name this very often, if it all. And this is where it becomes really interesting.

“Yirahis defined in three ways:

1. The feeling that overcomes us when we inhabit a larger space than we are used to.

2. The feeling we experience when we suddenly come into possession of more energy than we had before.

3. What we feel in the presence of the divine.”

So it’s the fear of standing tall, of moving into a new space or way of being. The feeling of “OMG, am I really here to do this?” The fear of moving towards something you really want. The fear we experience when we step into our own power.

Tara writes “Yirah is the fear that shows up in those moments when we uncover a dream, access our real feelings about an important situation, or contemplate taking a big leap toward a more authentic life. We feel sacred awe, which has a kind of trembling in it.”

Of course we often experience Pachad and Yirah together but it’s worth unpacking them.

So how do you do that?

Tara writes

“1. Ask yourself: what part of this fear is pachad? Write down the imagined outcomes you fear, the lizard brain fears. Remember they are just imagined, and that pachad-type fears are irrational. 

2. Savour yirah. Ask yourself: what part of this fear is yirah? You’ll know yirah because it feels different. It has a tinge of exhilaration and awe –while pachad has a sense of threat and panic. You can savour it, knowing it’s just a signal that tells you are touching sacred ground within. You can keep leaning into – even looking for – the callings and leaps that bring yirah.”

There is a spiritual language here that I wouldn’t normally use, but I think it is a  really helpful way to re-think fear. I see this fear quite often on the second day of my courses. 

A participant might say:  

“Damn you, if I’m no longer scared of public speaking then I have no excuse, and there is nothing stopping me from doing what I want to do. That’s differently scary!”

Now I can put a name to that fear.

It’s Yirah and it’s a fear we need to move towards. And I will be standing in Yirah for my speaking gig in May.

Wish me luck.