Warrior Scholar Ideal Blog: Managing Fear 002

In the next few blogs, we’re going to cover one of the most important topics that occurs the minds and bodies of 99.9% of the human population and that is fear.

We’re going to discuss fear from the perspective of what it is, how to understand it, and how to reframe (cognitive reframing) fear in your mind. We’re also as we go long offer methods, we use to not only help people manage fear but steps that we use ourselves to push past our own fears.

Now, because we are also self-defense instructors we view these things primarily through that lens, so the focus is going to be on how to develop a stoic mindset towards danger especially if one finds themselves having to face a situation where in a split second you have to summon the courage and the will to take action.

This understanding is different than those who merely discuss the Warrior Scholar ethos from a purely philosophical / academic, or even historical context. While such discussions are important and an integral part of developing the proper mindset and an aspect found wanting in many martial arts systems. I can tell you that since the book The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited, was published some have offered, not so much criticisms, but observations that the concept of the warrior scholar, its virtues and ethos is not new.

However, they misunderstand that the book does not attempt to rewrite what has already been covered over thousands of years but instead offers a fresh look at an old idea by pushing the concept out of the corridors of military establishments and literature and into the conscious of the general public for the man or woman who wishes to understand the true nature of for example, fear, and develop a process to overcome fears that have shaped their behavior in undesirable ways.

We’ve all had experiences where we wish we had responded differently, maybe because we were afraid to act or speak up. Maybe because our sense of anxiety, irrational fears, and imaginations got the better of us where we momentarily lost the ability to just “think” in a given situation. Or where we felt when reading about an incident in the news of some horror that visited some law-abiding citizens and realizing that maybe we would not have fared much better given a perceived lack of skill or preparedness.

Whatever the reason, we felt we were not in the place we wished to position ourselves and would like nothing more than to go back and change it to perhaps achieve a different outcome even if all we are doing is to make ourselves feel better. Well, we can’t change the past, but we can change how we think and act from this point on so that we can use the experience as an anchor of wisdom from which to develop a different mindset, and outlook. It is this idea of developing a new mindset to achieve and shape different outcomes where this next series of posts will focus and provide some basic tools to aid in your journey.

Fear

There have been a multitude of writings on the subject and let’s face it, fear has been with us and the desire to overcome or manage it since we have been making war on each other. As long as there is risk of death at the hands of another or even act of nature there will always be fear. When you read the writing of the ancient Greek philosophers or the stoics regarding the subject the reason, they knew so much about it is because many of them were not merely philosophers but warriors.

Having faced death, they had a particular understanding as to the nature of fear because more times than they probably wanted they have to steel their nerves and overcome it to lead into battle. Thucydides spoke to the nature war and is often quoted because he fought in the Peloponnesian war. Julius Caeser often spoke about overcoming fears because more than an emperor, he was the Commander of the 13th Roman Legion. Our contention is this hasn’t changed, in fact in a world were killing requires less physical skill the development of a more stoic warrior mindset and awareness is probably even more critical.

Fear can be simply defined as an intense experience to a given situation or stimuli. So, for our purposes when we describe fear, we are talking about two things, 1) the physiological response in the body as it relates to danger whether actual or perceived and 2) how the physiological triggers play a dual role in either determining our responses or contextualizes the experience in the present and shaping future responses of similar nature.  

Whatever people believe it to be the good news is, we can change how we view it, and respond to it. Our contention is many things that we are afraid of are because we at an early age and throughout our lives are conditioned to be afraid of them. In a subsequent book on fear which is a follow up to the Warrior Scholar Idea Revisited, we delve into this aspect more deeply. 

As we describe in the Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited there are two types of fear:

• Irrational Fear which is fear for fear’s sake. This is where many of our anxieties and phobias reside.

• Rational Fear or as we like to refer to it as “Recognizing Danger,” and often referred to as the good kind of fear or U-stress (i.e., useful stress) in which its recognition that keeps us alive or helps us focus under duress.

"As a result of a general defect of nature, we are either more confident or more fearful of unusual and unknown things." ⎯Julius Caesar

When you think of the two types of fear, what you want to do is think of them in this fashion as shown in a brilliant diagram I was once shown regarding how we prioritize issues.

Rational fears are real problems that have to be dealt with whereas irrational fears are imagined problems. Unfortunately, most of our energy is spent focused on things on the right side of the circle or imagined problems or our anxieties which is nothing more than our fears projected into the future.

When it comes to overcoming or managing fear the task is not to eliminate all fear because it is not possible but to eliminate irrational fear or our imagined problems so we can spend energy on solving real problems. You can’t fix irrational fears because they don’t exist except in imagination and the sooner you accept, they are not real the sooner you can get rid of them and move on.

So, how do we learn to manage danger?

The key is in understanding that, since fear has a neurological basis that is shaped by our perceptions or contextual understanding, which shapes our experiences, beliefs, and finally behaviors. We then must dig down into the depths of our souls into those things that cause us to behave a certain way, those things that scare us in the first place and ask ourselves the hard questions and that is why is something perceived as dangerous to us?

Then ask, so what are we going to do about it?

In the next post we will examine how we go about answering those questions for ourselves because such self-inquiry was at the heart of how the great philosophers and stoics were able to come to terms with their own fears and form brilliant insights.

Thanks.  

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)

Authors, The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited