What does it mean to have faith without fear? This is a big life lesson that will likely come up often. There is so much in our lives these days that can cause some nervousness, anxiety, and fear. But with a new shift in perspective, you can face things head on with confidence.
One of the first times I learned what it meant to live life despite the fear you may be feeling, was when I heard a speech by Will Smith.
If you are curious at all to hear how this motivational talk could completely changed your perspective, and positively affected your life, then keep reading.
The Quote
This quote is from a viral video. In the video, Will Smith is talking about his experience skydiving and what he learned from it. He talks about how racked with anxiety he was until the moment he jumped.
Will said, “the point of maximum danger is the point of minimum fear”. He continues by saying, my favorite part which is, “God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear”.
Take a moment and really think about what that means.
The thing about faith is that when you are truly able to trust, then you have much less stress, anxiety, and when it comes to the unknown or change. Overall, I interpreted what Will Smith said as meaning that it is important to live our lives with more faith and trust. Essentially, trusting that at the end of the day everything work out the way it’s meant to, whether we wasted time stressing about it or not.
Watching that video, I felt like Will Smith was talking straight to me. I began to reflect on how much of my life was controlled by some sort of fear. I want to share some examples that I noticed in my personal life.
What I wore- fear of judgement
Working hard in school- fear of a bad grade/failure
People pleasing- fear of conflict…
I’d love for you to take a moment to think about what parts of your life are driven by fear. You can just think about it, or consider writing them down.
Living life having fear motivate you can be extremely stressful. While being motivated by passion, care, and purpose is much more fulfilling. I think that Will was saying that if you are feeling fear then let that be the thing that makes you do it.
Now how can you learn to be driven by fear, rather than held back?
How to transition to a faith mindset?
With a little understanding of the concept of living with more faith and less fear, lets learn more about how to apply this to your life.
It is important to identify the underlying reasons/motives that are rooted in fear. Hopefully you remember what you were just thinking about or wrote down. If you struggled to think of anything that is driven by fear, think about these questions.
Questions to ask yourself, reflect on, and if you’d like, journal (click to read more about journaling).
Are you often coming up with worse case scenarios?
Are you holding back your personality while socializing?
Are you following your dreams and passions? If not, why not?
Are you coming up with reasons on why you can’t do something?
Keep asking your self why until you find the underlying reason behind why you do or don’t do certain things. You may notice that the root cause is from a fear.
After you identify the fear, we need to replace that mindset with something positive. Having something empowering that you can replace negative thoughts with will help you rewrite the narrative in your head. From an “I can’t” to an “I can” internal dialogue. Changing something so deeply engrained in you can be difficult, but having a reminder can be such a big help(Read more about this topic-Mind River).
Have a go to mantra/affirmation(something that combats these limiting mindsets/ beliefs)
Some examples being:
-Everything will work out
-I will be okay
-Worse case scenario is that I learn something
-I will figure it out
-I am strong
-I am capable
-I am willing to try
A frequent reminder
Here are a few common things you can use to trigger the memory of your favorite mantra or the concept of faith with out fear.
- A tattoo
- A piece of jewelry
- Notification on your phone
- A note or poster
The intention is that the reminder is directly correlated in your mind with your goals so that each time you see it, you think about your mantra/quote.
For me it was enough motivation to change my mindset with the mantra, “faith over fear”. Anytime I recognized the feeling of fear driving a thought, decision, or action, I would try to replace it with Faith. I reminded myself “it will all work out”, “trust the process”.
Real Life Application/Example
Will Smiths quote was a great change of perspective when it came to fear, but as society has its influence and I often fall back into a pattern of letting fear control me. I was, once again, reminded not to let fear control me while I was attending university.
For a bit of context, I was at a turning point where I needed to make a decision. I felt strongly that attending university was no longer serving me. In fact, at that stage it was doing more harm than good. I had to decide to either continue attending school or drop out. I am a firm believer of following your intuition, but I can also sympathize with how difficult that truly can be. As loudly as my gut was speaking to me, the fears were almost just as demanding.
I feared judgement for not finishing school.
I feared the future, that I wouldn’t be able to get a good stable job.
Overall I feared the unknown, not having a clue what my next steps would be, and where would they take me.
It felt like a constant battle in my head. The spiritual/intuition vs logic/conditioning.
Anyway, at the time I was expressing a lot of these concerns with my roommate. One day, she had a guest lecturer speak in a class she was attending. She thought about how relevant the speech was to my life at the time and got me the contact information of the lecturer. Her name happened to be Angel(no coincidence to me). Angel was formerly a therapist, and at the time a practicing life coach. She agreed to meet with me for a chat. Little did I know that this 2-3 hour conversation would impact the direction my life has taken since that day.
A Piece of Advice
There were many things Angel taught me, but the #1 lesson I learned was, “Faith and Fear can not coexist”.
What does Angel mean by “Faith and Fear can not coexist”? Let’s first break it down.
What is faith?
Faith is trusting in something you cant explain/ don’t understand.
What is Fear?
Fear is an emotion/response to danger. Danger to your well being (mental/physical…).
Angel is saying that if you are fearing something, you are not having faith, and if you are showing faith then you are not fearing. Now it may not be so black and white. Maybe you can be on a scale of faith or fear, but I knew that my ultimate goal is to be fully driven by faith which meant I need to work out my fears as much as possible.
When it came to deciding to drop out of college, I chose to have faith. I chose to trust my intuition, to know that it was all going to work out, or worse case scenario, I was going to learn something. So I dropped out, and I am beyond grateful that I made that choice, because I would not be who I am or where I am today without turning away from fear and towards faith. With this experience, I knew how important it was to me to continue having faith.
My frequent Reminder
It took one more experience of following my intuition rather than conditioned fears that made me want to remember “God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear” forever. I was in another transitional phase about 2-3 years later, as I began questioning the religion I was raised with. I once again felt drawn by intuition, but this time to question religion. As I searched for truth, I ended up finding a lot of inconsistencies as well as a misalignment of my values/who I want to be. With this decision to distance myself from that religion came a lot of fear and discomfort. As mentioned earlier in this post, I wanted some sort of physical reminder to prioritize faith, so I decided to get a tattoo.
My Tattoo
For months prior to this change, I had been wanting a tattoo that symbolized Will Smiths quote, but I wasn’t sure how it would look. As I was practicing the affirmation, “I knew it would work out”, the pieces slowly began to come together. My first official tattoo came to be while I was visiting one of my best friends. During the visit, we had many deep chats about religions, and I finally committed. As a reminder of something I believe in with out a doubt, I got a tattoo of a dragonfly, directed towards a star, which is pointed to a sun.
Symbolism: The dragonfly represents myself(my spirit animal), the star at the time represented Jesus(an example of who I wanted to be like), and the sun represents God/a higher power. I was also very intentional about the tattoos not being in a straight line to represent that life is not linear. Life isn’t so easy that all we have to do is go straight and we will get to the things we want. During this journey of exploring religions, my symbols have changed meaning a bit, but the overall message and meaning behind the quote has stayed the same.
The Final Product
I later got the snake added. The snake represents fear and temptation. I wanted the snake to be moving between the dragonfly, star, and sun. This represents those things, “the best things in life”, “on the other side of fear”, the snake.
Why did I choose to get a tattoo?
I am grateful for this quote, because it inspires me frequently to push past fear and do hard things. My tattoo has worked well as a reminder that everything will workout in the end and that I may as well not stress, and just practice a little faith.
Whether it is a tattoo, a piece of jewelry, a notification on your phone, or any other form of frequent reminder, I 10/10 recommend finding a way to remember to practice more faith/trust.
Comment Section Questions:
What is a fear you have that you would like to practice more faith with?
What is a time in your life that you faced your fears?
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