The Fear Bubble: Harness Fear and Live Without Limits

by Ant Middleton

fear is like a wild horse. You can let it trample all over you, or you can put a harness on it and let it carry you forwards, blasting you unscathed through the finish line.

More than anything else, I believe that my ability to harness fear and use it to my advantage is the secret of my success.

Without fear, there’s no challenge. Without challenge, there’s no growth. Without growth, there’s no life.

Becoming the person we want to be, with the life we’ve always dreamed of living, is simply a matter of developing the courage to open more doors.

going to explore how damaging fear can actually be to the individual and everyone around them if it’s not contained. Living in fear is corrosive. It creates negativity that spreads throughout a whole life and actually changes the way you perceive reality.

fear makes the entire world seem threatening, dangerous and populated by aggressors.

I’ll then take a deep look into the three kinds of fear: fear of suffering, fear of failure and fear of conflict.

Positive thinkers push and change themselves in order to succeed in the world. Negative thinkers want the world, and other people, to change in order to accommodate them.

Hard work, grit, determination, brutal honesty, self-accountability – this is the hard way around. This is the route to success that a person

can take pride in. Working hard every single day is not easy. Being brutally honest with yourself is not easy. Holding yourself accountable and accepting the consequences of your actions is not easy. But do you know what is easy? Blaming everyone else for your problems.

It’s through conflict and pain that they learn how to deal with conflict and pain.

It’s how they learn courage. It’s how they come to understand that when they do lose, which will inevitably happen, they can pick themselves up, brush themselves off and try to win the next time. It’s how they became capable of opening those doors and bursting into new corridors, growing and taking responsibility and becoming better people.

Success is really having the ability not to let fear and negativity rule your life and dictate your mindset.

Obsessing over the past keeps you stuck in the same corridor. It makes you shrink.

don’t have to let others define who you are.

Not letting anyone else define who you are is about being unafraid of what other people think of you.

we should be motivated by pride and not ego,

‘success’ is not a place that exists in the real world. Success is a feeling.

When people become Yes men or women, they’re acting out of fear. It’s a sign that they’re stuck in their corridors. They’re not leaders, they’re followers. They’re never going to be any use to the team because they’re not contributing their honest point of view. If you look very closely at the average Yes man, I swear you can almost see him physically shrinking before your eyes.

You can’t centre your whole life on the pursuit of pleasing other people. But that’s what ego needs to do to satisfy itself. Ego needs praise. It cares too much about other people’s opinions. But you can’t control what other people think of you, and neither should you want to.

What they think of you is up to them. Leave it to them. Pride, meanwhile, requires no external praise, and that’s why it doesn’t hold you back. Once you stop trying to please everyone else all the time, you become free.

Show me a person without enemies and I’ll show you a person whose boots are soaked in glue – a shrinking violet, a victim, a failing person, paralysed by fear.

The big three fears – of suffering, failure and conflict – all have the power to give us sticky boots and root us to the spot, keeping us in the same corridor, turning us negative, making us shrink.

‘I’m not good enough’ is the ultimate human fear.

You don’t look backwards to walk forwards. It’s only once you fully grasp the fact that all these negative thoughts about you being ‘damaged’ or ‘not good enough’ are just chatter that you’ll have the capacity to become limitless.

Forget the past. You can’t change it. It has no power over you. And forget the future too. You can’t control that either. You can only change your life in the present. All that matters is right now.

You should be motivated by pride, not by ego. It’s ego that gets you killed.

I met a negative situation with negative thinking, then negative would be all I could ever hope to get back.

My favourite quote of all time captures this idea perfectly. It comes from the philosopher Alan Watts, who once wrote, ‘You’re not something that’s a result of the Big Bang. You’re not something that’s a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process.’ For me, that process is personal growth. The universe is in a state of constant expansion, and you are part of that universe. It wants you to expand and change. If you learn to harness your fear and let it take you where it wants to take you, then positive change is inevitable. You’ll become the person you never dreamed you were capable of becoming.

How we think defines how we act, and how we act defines the events of our life.