Back in the days when all of us spent the majority of our energy hunting down game and gathering fruits, vegetables, and grains for our meals fear came in really handy. Fear causes the "flight or fight" response so that our muscles will pump up with adrenaline so we can run faster than we ever could before to run from an enemy, or to stand and fight the bear, snake, or whatever predator has decided it would like to have us for dinner.

In modern day, now that most of don't have to live daily with the fear of life and death, the fears we experience are different but as equally deadly to our careers, business, and life: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of not being liked, fear of financial disaster, and fear of change. Even just one of these can hold you back from being the person you really want to be, from doing what you really want to do.

Let me explain using an example of a fear I got over, and a fear I'm working at getting over.

Since I was a little girl I wanted to write. I was seven years old when I decided I wanted to be a writer. People look at me weird when I say that, but it's true. One Halloween I found myself with a first unfinished sentence for my first story given to me as an assignment by a teacher. I did the assignment. My story was no better or no worse than any other child's in the class but something very valuable happened to me that day. Previously, I'd love to have books read to me, and I loved reading them. I loved the alphabet, and putting words together. I was already practicing writing my mother's name in handwriting without knowing what I was doing. But on that day I realized that when you string words together not only can you make a sentence, you can write a whole story, just like the stories my mom and dad read to me! That was the day I decided to become a writer. I told everyone about it, the same way Johnny comes home to say he wants to drive a fire engine when he grows up.

Time passed, and I shyly started writing my first articles in high school. Soon I was singled out within the school, and all of a sudden there were all these high expectations. "Oh our Andrea is going to be a famous writer. She's going to write the great Canadian novel," I would hear my parents say. At the same time, teachers in an effort to improve my writing would constantly criticize my work to help make it better. Then I went to university and took Journalism where I was criticized for four years about my writing. It made my writing better, but when I came out of school, I was terrified to write a word. The fear of writing was a fear of success. I was terrified of what would happen to me if I actually wrote something good. But the fear of facing a blank page and writing something on it was a fear of failure. My writer's block lasted years. It was like this gigantic monster which I could not kill, and it was holding me back from doing what made me happy, what I felt I was meant to do.

Solution? How is it I sit here writing to you today? Rather than taking the monster down all at once, I started weakening it like a swordsmen who nicks their opponent until their so weak from bleeding all over that defeating them is easy. I started by keeping one of those online diaries. Handwriting and doing "homework" to overcome my writer's block wasn't working. It felt too much like school. So I started a diary, and I just wrote my feelings. I didn't do it every day. I just wrote when I needed to. An idea for an article would come to mind, and so I would write the story in my diary. Soon I started getting all this positive feedback from total strangers. They'd say "write a book" or "you inspired me". I could be happy about it, and say thank you. I did not feel like there was all this pressure on me to write and become a gigantic success and so I took another jab at the monster. I didn't know them.

I woke up one morning, and wanted to write more of the first chapter of a novel I started years ago. It was four pages, handwritten, that I wrote one Sunday in downtown Ottawa while on creative kick. I could not bear to throw the pages away because I knew they were the start of something. I wrote them my first year of university. That day, six years later I trashed my room looking the four pages I'd guarded with my life, but they were gone, just gone.

So I began again. For three months I wrote almost every day and came up with my first draft of a handwritten novel. The characters were real to me. Then I put that away. All of a sudden, I knew I could write. I knew what others already knew. Whether I ever one the Giller Prize didn't matter, I was meant to write and if I ever did want to become good at my craft I had to work at it. So I started a newsletter, a website, and I started writing articles again. This year, I felt so confident I entered a novel writing competition at http://www.nanowrimo.com. As I write this on November 16, 2003 I am at 24,000 words with another 26,000 words to go before November 30th, 2003. I'm going to make it too and the novel is going to be a lot longer than 50,000 words. That writing block monster is gone by the way. It's afraid of me now!!!

Another monster still governs my life and is keeping me from success, and that's my fear of making phone calls. Many of you probably know what I mean. I'm terrified of picking up the phone to call a complete stranger, especially if it's for business, even if they want me to call them!!! It means I have to speak, and know what I'm talking about. I'd much rather just write.

So I've set up a December competition. I'm going to make 100 phonecalls to 100 for sale by owners and get my real estate lease option business off the ground. Is it going to be difficult? Yeah, but each time I make a phone call, it's going to get easier until picking up the phone will be easy.

You don't need to tackle the Fear Monster all at once. He's probably grown quite big and strong over the years as you've avoided doing things you want to do. Instead, start small, take a baby step that will nick your Fear Monster where he's not looking and before you know it, he'll be so weak from all those nicks and cuts, that your Fear Monster will just disappear.

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