FDR Taking the US Out of the Depression
“We have nothing to fear except fear itself.” A phrase forever connected to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A phrase instrumental in getting the United States out of The Great Depression. A phrase that allowed FDR to instill courage to the people of a nation even though it was in economic collapse. How did his words carry so much weight that he took the hopelessness that pervaded the society and replaced it with hope of recovery? It was during FDR’s “Fireside Chats” that he was able to communicate his message of hope. Hope that was delivered not to a nation but to each and every individual of that nation. FDR’s courage to conquer and take the fear out of life is a perfect example of what we can overcome no matter how insurmountable the situation we may encounter.
Defining Fear in this Ever Changing World
Fear is an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or is a threat.
Fear then, to greater or lesser extent, is a failure to take responsibility to confront that which you fear. Since fear can be emotionally charged, your fear can last a few minutes or if severe enough can last years or even a lifetime and, before you know it, Life and the joy of living has passed you by. We may think we’ve lived but how much more could we have experienced if we didn’t have fear in the background ready to put a stop on whatever we do. If you were to look into the future, did the bucket list of things you accomplished fit into a pail or did you need to use a barrel to take fear out of life?
How Our Associations Cause Our Greatest Fears
We often associate fear with something frightening like a scary movie, the ravages of war, natural disasters, losing a loved one, etc. The one thing we seem to overlook is how we perceive the world around us knowing fear is nearby. What far off lands have we decided not to visit? How many adventures have we missed? Who are the life-long friends have we failed to encounter? How many times have I lost a true love? Worst of all, what toll did fear take on us professionally?
What if I didn’t agree with the one professor that stressed I had to be very, very careful when opening a bite during a dental procedure? What if I didn’t agree with another professor that told me,” you won’t be as rich as you think, but you can live a comfortable life”? What if I had opened that office where they were building 10,000 new homes as suggested by a realtor? What if I had just listened to my gut feeling?
The “What Ifs” suddenly become your rationale when you wonder what you could possibly have accomplished during your Dental career.
How Your Fear of Failure is Your Number One Enemy
From the moment you were born, you’ve been under the protective care of parents/ guardians. It would only seem natural there needs to be some outside force to protect and care for us since we are too small to fend for ourselves. As time moved on, the force that was there caring for us should now fall into our own hands. But what happens during the time between suckling a mother’s breast and adulthood?
During that time period, we were exposed to responsibility. Looking deeper into responsibility, it really has two sides: to be responsible or not be responsible.
For example, one quickly learns what it means to be responsible when growing up on a farm and required to do chores; to be able to use your hands and exert force on your environment.
On the other hand, one is not afforded the chance to be responsible when one grows up with a silver spoon in their mouth and everything is handed to them. You now lack an ability to exert force on your environment.
Responsibility then is just an estimation of how much force you are willing to exert on your environment. To take fear out of life you are going to need to raise your responsibility. Success and failure is really then just a matter of responsibility. Success is revered while failure is frowned upon and swept under the rug.
So what went wrong?
If failure is responsibility gone wrong, it would seem then that failure should not be frowned upon but can actually become a useful tool. Learning from one’s mistakes actually allows you to grow and possibly even become more powerful. The only real problem then is if failure is stressed in another way and looked upon negatively. Imagine being degraded by parents, teachers, coaches every time you failed or didn’t win. All they are really saying to you is that you can’t handle force or that you’re not good enough. Without force , you can’t change your environment. You become the slave of your environment and your ability to move forward has been stopped because of fear of failure.
How Insidious Excuses Can Fuel Your Escape From Fear
Once you’ve loss your ability or will to exert force on your environment, you’ve basically told the environment that it won and you’ll answer only to it. Your answer to your environment comes in the form of excuses. Excuses of why it seems so difficult to make money, of not having a great staff, or even not having more patients that are willing to seek treatment and pay. It’s so easy to fall prey to the purveying thought that the economy is bad and people just won’t spend. It’s tough to find great and qualified workers. The workers of today just don’t understand responsibility and working for an honest day’s pay. Patients just won’t pay for treatment. They think I just want their money so I can buy a new BMW.
It’s just amazing how creative our excuses are just because we’ve lost our ability to impose our force on the environment.
How Blame Has Become Fears’ Ultimate Victory
The only thing you have left then is to blame everything around you and not be responsible. Blaming things becomes your modus operandi because it at least gives you the chance of being right.
What Blame is really telling you is that you are too weak to overcome the task at hand. Blaming may offer a temporary relief but if you were to follow the trail that Blame leaves, you will see the downfall of many a great men with power. Thoughts that were never in the realm of your reality can suddenly appear. Thoughts of despair, hopelessness, inferiority, and even anger can show its ugly face.
So what does blame really do?
All blaming really does is suck your energy, your life force, your dreams and aspirations out of you. Blame is insidious and takes no prisoners to have its way obeyed. It can make a man go astray. Why?
Blaming things takes your responsibility away and replaces it with irresponsibility. You’ve put yourself into the category of I don’t care. You’re actually taking a page from the thoughts of a victim. Meaning, life is against me and I need to get even.
Your irresponsibility will take the form of doing Dentistry that you know is outside the rules of your own personal ethics. What really then is “Bad Dentistry”? It’s performing inferior Dentistry that you know is detrimental to the health of your patient. How far do you really think Blaming things will get you?
How Blame Steals Power in the Face of Fear
What then is power? Simply, power is to have a fixed position in space: representing who you are and your ability to control your environment.
The more power you possess the greater space you can handle. Possession of power invokes competence and confidence. Do you recall ever going to a conference and when the speaker walked in you can sense something about him/you can feel his presence. A bigness that commands attention. Just like kryptonite was Superman’s weakness, blame too will also weaken one’s power.
Placing blame on someone, a thing , a situation only removes your responsibility and lessens your ability to control/to have power. How simple it is to blame the dental lab when a case didn’t go right.
To take fear out of life, one must have control. I would just redo the case and tell the patient there were factors that came into play which resulted in a corrupt product. By not placing blame and just redoing the case will insure your control and will resulting in a high level of goodwill. Goodwill in the form of providing a high quality product that the patient will appreciate.
Good simple honesty will go a long way in managing situations that may arise.
How Fear Can Cripple You From Reaching Your Full Potential
Fear is pervasive and does not discriminate. We see fear in our parents, friends, colleagues, loved ones , and basically anyone walking and breathing on this planet.
Our first experience with fear is probably from the people who have loved us the most, our parents. How many times have you been spanked for doing something , anything? Or heard their piercing voice as they stopped you from committing a most grievous act of stepping on a step stool as you reached for a jar of cookies. You were just using force/ effort in your environment to accomplish a task, which you now associate with fear because of your parent’s response to your actions.
We mentioned earlier fear had some sort of pain attached to it. In all their good intentions, our parents actually denied us from using force. Fear now had attached to it pain.
Where fear becomes a problem is when it becomes additive.
Let’s say you want to open an office in an area that may not be considered the best location by those people closest to you. You’ve studied the demographics and have insight that the area is up and coming. Instead of encouraging you, the people closest to you start to discourage and tell you all the negatives that may arise. Not only did you have some slight consideration in the risk you were about to take, but now, you have a collective effort by those closest to you.
The fear not only becomes additive but subconsciously your mind connects the same pain you experienced from your parents to the current scene. Your mind strangely enough connects fear of you getting cookies and you wanting to open an office. The connection then is pain.
How Overcoming Fear Restores the Greatest Skill of All: Responsibility
To overcome fear, all we really need to do is restore responsibility. Responsibility being a function of the level of force you exert on your environment. Depending on the size of the task at hand, the responsibility level can be very small or very large. Your level of force is generated from past experience and knowledge gained. Ability then comes into the forefront as more experience and more knowledge is introduced.
How to Understand the Duplicity of Responsibility and Ability
One needs a certain amount of ability to be fully responsible. With greater ability, one can then take on greater heights of responsibility.
If fear’s goal is to deny responsibility, it would follow then ability will begin to falter. Our abilities begin to wane because of our fear to become pro-active in the area in question.
It can get to the point that what we fear can become so overwhelming that we will turn our backs and avoid it at all cost.
Have you ever encountered the truly evil patient? You know, the one that will threaten you with a lawsuit because of how bad a dentist they say you are. The usual cause of this is because they don’t want to pay. You have a sense of relief when they stop calling. They never paid you, but you got them out of your hair.
Did they really leave or do you find yourself balding on one side of your head? It’s situations like these that can cause a decrease in ability. A failure really in our ability to confront the situation at hand.
It would seem that fear has the power to take away a person’s ability. Far from it.
Ability is Ability
It’s something that you will never lose.
Ability is really just a function of one’s estimation of force. One’s intuitiveness to get the job done. It is true some are a bit more capable than others, but, each persons’ ability will never leave.
All you really need to do is restore ability affected by the confusion fear has placed upon you.
What if we were to look at fear from a different perspective. We can just look at fear as everyday challenges. Some challenges being greater than others. We’ve all experienced challenges throughout our lives. The challenges of school, achieving the title Doctor, marriage, and work. By looking at fear from a different perspective, we are able to exert force on our environment rather than use fear as a simple excuse to stop ourselves when the task at hand becomes a bit daunting.
Where does fear really get its strength?
Fears only real strength is from the unknown.
The unknown involves your inability to communicate or to understand what’s going on around you. Restoration of ability then, is really about restoring your ability to control yourself and your environment thereby controlling fear and the unknown. With control you are at Cause and no longer the Effect of your environment.
You dictate what you want and will no longer be at the mercy of your surroundings.
How Control of Fear Can Restore the Losses In Life
What then will restore ability if fear results in a diminishing of ability?Restoring a person’s willingness to be responsible again will restore ability? An individual loses his sense of responsibility because of too many losses in life. With those losses is the attachment of pain. We instinctively move away from pain and gravitate towards pleasure.
Pleasure is winning and with it the rewards that this life has to offer.
Responsibility is control, but to control we really need to gain an understanding of what it is we want to handle. Let’s use a root canal procedure. Did you ever start a root canal, in particular a molar root canal, and the patients comes back the next day swollen and in severe pain? You tried to alleviate the pain by giving antibiotics and pain meds. The patient is not getting any better and you refer to the specialist. After several days with the specialist, the patient is now stable. How did you feel? You might have had a sense of confusion because you personally couldn’t resolve the infection. So what do you do? You stop doing root canals. You decided to take away your responsibility in doing root canals.
How do you restore your ability in doing root canals again?
To regain that ability, you need to gain control over the procedure and understand the procedure. However, before you can do that, you need to be able to confront the procedure again.
Confronting means to be there comfortably, to perceive. You can simply take all your root canal instruments and lay them on a table. Now take each one and hold it. Look at it and truly perceive what it is. Start feeling comfortable about being able to hold each instrument and understanding its use.
Next, you need to communicate and gain an understanding of what the procedure entails. This may require you taking some continuing education courses on molar endos. What you can do next is to perform procedures on a gradient level. First do single canals, followed by two canals, and then finally the three and four canal molars.
With full certainty one can now restore ability.
Fear then is really a study of responsibility. Responsibility on your end to either hide in the shadows of fear or to be fearless and move mountains. You create your universe and its gifts are endless.
Are you going to let Life pass you by or are you going to start confronting your fears? Leave a comment down below.