4 Pragmatic Reasons to Choose Faith Over Fear

I am responding to a post from Adrian Thompkins reposted by Dorian Cunion on LinkedIn. Both are asking their audience to choose Fear or Faith:

It is an insightful quote, but it is also kinda like asking someone to choose between being rich and being poor. The road to one is vastly different than the road to the other. Becoming poor is generally a lot easier than becoming rich. In the same way, catering to fear is a lot easier than catering to faith.

Human defense mechanisms are wired to be more fear motivated. Although it is indeed a choice, fear is stacked layer upon layer within us. Truly shedding it does NOT feel like a choice. It can be done. But the deck is stacked, biologically and naturally, in favor of fear (includes bias and racism).

Do not underestimate the effort it takes to choose faith. And the moment something bad happens, it will be all too easy to say, see? I should have chosen fear. All too easy to slip back into that comfortable darkness.

Faith can light the way, but again, similar to being rich and being poor. Being rich does not guarantee happiness. Neither does being poor. Being rich is often equated with success, but in truth success has many more facets that tie to deeper concepts like sense of purpose, sense of fulfillment, sense of belonging. These often get glossed over by folks who make a billion dollars, buy a leer jet, lead hundreds of thousands of people, get their fluffy egos stroked every 3 seconds on social media and yet wonder why they wake up feeling empty. Why hasn’t their success filled the void?

Part of the journey from fear to faith involves coming to terms with the deeper side of life’s swimming pool – choosing to invest in faith will not save a person from pain, suffering or from having to address their fears. In fact, over investing in faith can lead to something called “toxic positivity,” which can be as unhealthy as catering to fear all the time. It’s important, when investing in faith to set realistic expectations. Faith is a reflective journey, it takes effort, we all make mistakes along the way, and it will almost always feel more natural to just give in to a fear-based mindset or behavioral response.

If it is such a wild ride, why should we bother with faith at all, then? I believe the laundry list of benefits faith can provide over fear is very long, but people should know what they are getting into, or they might fail early and believe it is something they just cannot succeed in adopting. By understanding the pitfalls and what to expect, it becomes OK to make mistakes, OK to forgive yourself and others in your life, and definitely OK to consider and aspire to these massive benefits. Feel free to add to this list! Investing in faith:

• can inspire you to learn about yourself at the deepest levels possible: Fear-based programming creates psychological scotomas – mental blind spots that act like “Novocaine”: they save you from pain, but at the expense of letting these programs run your life without your being aware of them. The stuff of many self-help books, choosing faith allows you to stop numbing those areas, and make conscious choices about those pain points in your life, often processing the pain more effectively, feeling better about yourself and moving your life in a better direction.
  
• can re-frame how we approach life, including the situations we fear: By addressing the fear-programs running our decisions, we open up the door to contemplating a wider array of options in our lives. We allow ourselves more room to make mistakes, and we’ve come to terms with our fears, which means we can decide how to face them more productively when confronted with them again.
  
• can temper knee-jerk ego and provide breathing room for rationale thought and disciplined action: fear-based programming gobbles up our free will. It’s done to protect us, but in modern society this can actually create more problems than solutions and can trap us in very narrow versions of ourselves which are distant from who we initially set out to become. This programming short-cuts rational thought causing us to make “snap” decisions that don’t take into account the entirety of a situation, pander to our fear, and might actually be bad decisions for us and for those around us (loved ones, friends, colleagues and the business at hand). Extending faith into these situations can create space and deeper understanding, resulting in better decisions from everyone.
  
• can empower you toward the things you want in life much more holistically than fear by itself ever will: Fear has its place (I call it “full spectrum contemplation”, and that is necessary when your are considering potential outcomes of a choice), but going with fear-based programming means the decision gets made for us by our fears, and we may not even notice it if there is a scotoma in play. A deep enough rooted fear can alter our vision and hearing – filtering and adjusting what gets stored in our memory. Sounds amazing right? It is. To see this in action, take an art or drawing class. A lot of training in these classes is to stop us from drawing based on what we “think” is in front of us, and actually draw what “IS” in front of us. There is a huge difference between what we actually see and what we think we see. Investing in faith is like reinventing our sensory system so it doesn’t filter so much out of our lives, it allows us to experience life more completely, make choices based more on what we desire than what we fear, and to accept fear as part of that picture without letting it rule over us unchecked.

I saw this post on linked in. And my knee-jerk response was, “Well, choose faith of course.” But then I caught myself pandering to a short cut caused by an internal program I have created for myself (it is, ironically, actually rooted in that same pattern used by fear. . . “OF COURSE I CHOOSE FAITH, DUH!” is actually a fear-based programming response!). I had to stop myself, create space and contemplate the real, full answer to the proposed question. It has a lot more moving parts. And for others who want to choose faith and might not be experiencing the best results in their attempts, I wanted to share this post. Hope it was helpful. All the best.

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