How to Deal with Fear of Change

The word change is more feared than death and taxes. I have often wondered why? How does the anticipation of doing something new or being in a new context, elicit so much fear?  There must be a connotation and meaning that change will bring bad things. What if we made change for the better? If we wore the hat of an adventurer and actually looked forward to change? Considering change would be a totally different story! 


​Dealing with the fear of change is my expertise. Having come from an above average income family, we had everything. My parents loved life. We went to the beach on holidays at every school break and fear was something we never thought of. We just got into action and did what we had to. This taught my siblings and I to move through change comfortably and ride the wave, when we were faced with a challenge.


​I guess my parents taught us how to eradicate negative emotions without formally attending an NLP course. Today I look back and think it pretty cool. That I migrated from Malaysia to Australia then to Singapore, with that very mindset. Staying stuck in the same place is actually more risky as we remain numb and end up lacking clarity about the future. It is true that our brain prefers familiarity and certainty.


However the neuro-plasticity of our brain also allows us to change and be adaptive to our environment. This is what I teach at an NLP course. How to re- direct your brain to what you really want. Most people have difficulty dealing with fear of change because they do not have the self-tools to do so. Could you drive a car if your spouse or parent bought you one and you had never driven a car in your life? Of course not! 


The same analogy applies here. We expect people to know how to eradicate negative emotions, in this case fear, but we don’t equip them with tools for change. One big factor to assist people when they are dealing with fear of change, is to help them build resilience which are skills taught at an NLP course. From this point, help them realise that the fear they feel, is a figment of their imagination. 


Clear the course by helping them create strategies of what it would look like, when they have made the change. Options and possibilities abound. This gets enthusiasm levels up and re-focuses them on the future, rather than the past. ​

Typically at an NLP course like “Create Your Future Now”, content is geared towards the past to eradicate negative emotions first. We call this remedial work that helps to remedy the past. Once past this milestone, we generate the future to build resilience, for instance. The idea is to focus on purpose which is exciting and magnetic. This pulls the person forward into the future, at a much faster pace. 

When in this mindset, people are fired up and the past is left in the past, where it belongs. I often say that the value of the past is that we learn from it, so we don’t make the same mistakes again. It also avails a wonderful opportunity to revisit good memories. Other than that, it is far more valuable to focus on the future, where we are able to create what we want. 

Most often it is the perfectionist who sits in a box of life that they have designed for themselves, as they are unwilling to have unexpected twists occur. To me that is not life. Doing the same thing over and over again to perfection. Whose idea of perfection is that anyway? We are a diverse culture today. Perfection lies in the imperfection. 

In my life as I moved countries, then careers and ended up running my own business, I allowed myself to flow with life. There were no expectations. Just awareness of the present and intuition to guide me in making decisions.  Some were good and some were bad. No matter. I learnt how to pick myself up and move on to the next place. I eventually found my calling by doing an NLP course that gave me loads of self-management tools.

My resolve to build resilience was mighty. Dealing with fear of change didn’t even occur as I had overwritten my past script in replacement for a future one. I had connected to my purpose. This only becomes available once you eradicate negative emotions. It is like a freeing of the spirit and liberation of the soul. This is what people who are dealing with fear of change, miss out on.

So this is where they need to redirect their focus.