Fear Guru Patrick Sweeney: Fear Is Fuel, Fire, And Fiction

Fear is a powerful thing. It can hobble us, preventing us from taking action and putting ourselves ‘out there’ when it manifests as “but what if I fail?” or “what will people think” or “what if I’m not good enough.” And it can cripple us in the form of phobias, anxiety or even fear of the unknown. 

And fear can also be used against us, as it has for many hundreds and hundreds of years. We are sold products on the promise that they will keep us safe from the bacteria on our kitchen surfaces. That they will stop us failing at life. That they will make us whole and happy, and prevent us from becoming nobodies with crappy lives instead of somebodies with all the shiny things we could ever dream of.

But fear can be used for much more sinister purposes than just selling us stuff. It is regularly used to sell toxic ideologies. It is used this way by politicians throughout the political spectrum, and it has become a staple of modern campaigning – and more.

Whole demographics of society can be demonized, and fear can be used to drive a wedge between us, to deny our humanity, and to keep us separated. That fear we feel when we think of people who are different to us as being the ‘enemy’ – people of different races, people on the other side of the border, people who need our help, who we are told might be a threat to our way of life – has been engineered intentionally over generations.

And on the whole, this fear is false. When we encounter it in our personal lives, preventing us from getting on that plane, from asking for that pay rise, from asking that person out on a date, we are worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet, and we’re letting it hold us back from be better and having better lives.

But worse, when we feel that fear when we encounter people who are somehow different to us – often manifesting in other forms such as anger, or disgust, or resentment – often it is a fictitious concept that has been planted in us by those who benefit from keeping us divided.

In this episode of my podcast I speak to Fear Guru, Patrick Sweeney, author of the bestselling book “Fear is Fuel”. We talk about where fear comes from, how it holds us back, how we can overcome it and how we can use it to make ourselves stronger and our lives better. And we touch briefly on the role it has played in hundreds of years of oppression around the world, that is currently manifesting in the protests against injustice that we are seeing in cities across the globe.

Patrick’s website: www.pjsweeney.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/pjsweeney
Instagram: www.instagram.com/thefearguru 
Buy the book: Fear is Fuel