The Joy of Abject Fear

When was the last time you felt truly afraid? If you can’t remember then may it’s time to embrace the thrill of facing and overcoming whatever scares you. Norah Casey coaches one woman who is terrified of public speaking. Did she succeed? Read on to find out

It may be an odd notion, but fear provides impetus and energy in your life. Not the paralysing, limiting fear that takes years off you. I’m thinking more of the kind of fear that makes you realise how long it has been since you stepped outside your comfort zone and took a risk. When we are young, we are almost always doing things for the first time – sitting significant exams at school, going to college, attending for interviews, the first day in a new job – it’s part of growing up, to face things that scare us and overcome that fear. Nonetheless, there is a perceived wisdom that we should avoid situations that make us feel fear. We have a fear of fear itself – that it will debilitate us, embarrass us or even destroy us. It’s not true. In fact, fear keeps us alive and, more importantly, it makes us feel alive.

I talk all the time about how I have learned far more from failure than success in my business life. Way before the current trend towards embracing failure in leadership growth, I was preaching to young entrepreneurs about the importance of failing and the lessons you can learn from things going wrong. If everything I had ever tackled and every risk I had ever taken had paid off, I wouldn’t have achieved what I have achieved in my business life. So how does failure relate to fear? For me, they come hand in hand – being afraid to be afraid limits us in terms of risk-taking. We grow up to fear failure – in our achievements, exams, relationships – if we set goals, we want to succeed. That’s a healthy aspiration, but where it becomes limiting is when, as we grow older and have more control over our lives, we choose goals we know we can achieve. We can determine how high to set that bar so that it remains attainable for us – worse still, we stop setting the bar at all. 

In fact, our fear of fear becomes so ingrained that as we go through life, we automatically shun activities and situations that might make us feel frightened. But remember back to your fearless younger self who took a risk on meeting someone new, who made new friends and learned how to live away from home. Remember that and then remember how energising and liberating it feels to face something daunting, and to win through. It’s a fantastic feeling and it makes us feel we are really living life to the full. 

I was helping someone recently who has painfully shy and deeply uncomfortable speaking in public. Caroline (not her real name) had spent her life avoiding having to put up her hand or take the lead during company presentations. In all the time I have known her, I can count on one hand the amount of times she has spoken in public – at meetings or conferences. She came to me because her daughter was getting married. Caroline is a single mum and she wanted to do her proud on the day with a speech. It took a lot of courage for Caroline to come to see me because we are business associates and she had to admit something deeply personal in terms of her fears and worries. She told me she was spurred on because her daughter was already finding ways to excuse her from her mother-of-the-bride duties – more especially as she knows how painfully shy she is when speaking in public. She really wanted to impress her and the rest of the family and prove that she could do something she had spent a lifetime avoiding. We painstakingly worked through hours of practice, honing the script, the delivery, the pauses, the humour. It took weeks to create the perfect ten-minute speech that hit the right note in terms of tone and delivery. It was important that the speech sounded like it was her – not ‘Norah Casey’. There were times when she would throw down the pages in frustration if she forgot her lines or stumbled over words, and on those days she would threaten to give up. But she still came for the next session with renewed determination. Now unless you understand the gut-wrenching anxiety of someone who shuns the spotlight having to speak in public, you won’t really appreciate what a challenge this was for her. Not only was she confronting those fears at a very significant event, she was also going to be talking to the most important people in her life, who can be, by the way, sometimes our harshest critics. 

When the big day arrived Caroline had managed to keep her preparations a secret; her daughter and the rest of the family were anxiously asking her if she had a speech ready. Caroline had no notes and no speech because she was rehearsed to within an inch of her life and needed no paper to remind her of what she was going to say. I called her and she was full of self-doubt  – imagining all kinds of terrible scenarios that might happen, from forgetting her lines to being stilted in her delivery. But she also had a determination to see it through – she had worked hard and she wanted to succeed. 

I was in the room on that day, there as a wedding guest. When she stood up, I could see her daughter and son-in-law glancing anxiously at her – they were being protective. Also perhaps a bit worried for her sanity as she didn’t appear to have a single note in her hands. What followed next was amazing – Caroline delivered her speech with confidence, pausing at all the right moments, glancing around the room to include everyone in her eye-line, she smiled warmly at her daughter and pulled off a nice tongue-in-cheek joke about her new son-in-law. When she finished, the applause was thunderous and her daughter leapt to her feet to hug her warmly. She was the talk of the day. And what of Caroline herself? I have never seen her look more alive than that day, she was pumped up, animated, talkative – there was a vibrancy about her that almost made her a magnet for people. Her energy was phenomenal. I asked her later in the evening how she felt and she told me she hadn’t felt so alive for a long time. 

For Caroline, facing her fears in this way did change her life. She didn’t go on to become a motivational speaker or to run for the presidency, but there was a significant change in her behaviour. She is now much more comfortable interjecting in board-room conversations, I have heard her make excellent points at public events and she has even been an expert commentator on a current affairs programme on radio. She knew her fear was holding her back, so she pummelled it into submission – and she has never regretted that action.

Caroline is just one of many examples I could use to illustrate this point. We all have things that scare us, but it’s not good to sit back and never tackle that fear. If you do that, it holds sway over you and is likely to become bigger and more irrational as you get older. You can take a key piece of advice from Caroline’s story: prepare to tackle your fear. If you are well prepared, you can achieve anything. You’ll have to put in the hard work beforehand, but if you set yourself a difficult goal, one that involves risk, you will get a huge sense of achievement from conquering your fear and attaining that goal. I have written often about our collective obsession with youthfulness, our need to look young fuels an immense beauty and fashion industry. Wouldn’t it be truly revolutionary if we were more obsessed with feeling young? Being fearless is a state of mind - taking risks, doing new things, and striding boldly forward to achieve whatever we want at whatever time in our life.

Here are five terrifying things I did to help overcome my fears

1. I am terrified of heights but I climbed Carrauntoohil 

2. I am a really nervous on a plan and here I am flying one

3. White Water rafting was exhilarating and terrifying

4. Adrenalin overload doing laps at Mondello 

5. I love elephants but never imagined being this close to a beautiful matriarch rescued from the logging industry in northern Thailand