When I was afraid of dogs (and I mean deathly afraid of dogs) and I would encounter a dog, my instinct was always to turn and run.  If I spotted one 10 feet away or 100 feet away or 1000 feet away, I would turn and I would hightail it out of there.  Just hearing that simple jingle of the collar was enough to trigger this “turn and run” instinct. 

And most of the time the dogs would chase me.

People told me that I shouldn’t run, that I was encouraging them to chase me, but my instinct to run was far too strong to override.  So run I did. 

When people would ask me what I was afraid of specifically, I didn’t have an answer.  I didn’t know what I thought might happen if the dogs caught up with me.  It was just a non-descript fear.

Over the years, though, it became clear that running simply wasn’t working.  The dogs were always chasing me.  It became clear that running from them wasn’t helping me at all to actually avoid them which was my singular goal.  In fact, it seemed to be making things worse.  It was chaos.  In my effort to avoid the dogs, I was inadvertently engaging them like nothing else could.

I grew desperate.  So, I made the choice to start turning toward them as people had been encouraging me to do for so long.  It was terrifying.  I absolutely hated it.  It was so hard.  My heart would pound, and I would be sweating buckets.  But I turned and faced them anyway.  I looked straight at them.  Most importantly, I stopped running.

Did this help?  In a word, yes. It wasn’t magic, but when looking straight at the dogs, I could see what I was dealing with and they didn’t seem as interested in the chase.  I now found myself looking at them, not trying to outrun them.

Ultimately this would lead to my conquering my fear of dogs completely.

What do you find yourself turning and running from rather than just stopping and facing head on?  You might not want to run from dogs (most people don’t), but what are you running from?  What are you avoiding looking at directly because of your fear of what might happen or what you might see? 

What might you be avoiding?

• Do you avoid facing things about yourself that you have told yourself are bad?

• Do you avoid facing difficult emotions that you fear might overwhelm you?

• Do you avoid facing new or challenging tasks that you don’t know how to conquer?

• Do you avoid facing people you don’t agree with or people who are different than you in some fundamental way?

• Do you avoid facing the discomfort of being wrong?

• Do you avoid facing conflict or dysfunction on your team or with your family or peers?

When a child hides her eyes and truly believes she is invisible or that the thing she doesn’t want to see is not there, we think it’s sweet and cute.  However, we adults do the same thing in our own way.  We look away or otherwise avoid and run from uncomfortable situations but it’s no longer sweet and it’s no longer cute.

How does this show up?

Avoiding discomfort can show up in a million different ways.  Maybe some of the following will seem familiar to you.

• Do you pretend to be somebody or something that you’re not.  When you want to be at home reading, are you out at a party trying to have a good time?  Or when you want to be working with animals, are you working your jobs as an engineer?  Or maybe you’re pretending to be a dog person when you’re really a cat person?

• Do you put on a happy face no matter what?  Or do you try to get attention with your sad stories or victim stories?  Do you never want to seem angry, so you blindly agree with everybody around you?  Or maybe you never want to seem sad, so you act as the cheerleader for everyone around you, refusing to acknowledge hard times?

• Do you stay safe by staying in roles that are easy for you, not risking taking the chance of jumping into something that might be slightly (or extremely) out of your comfort zone?

• Do you state your views loudly on social media sites, proclaiming that people should listen to you, but when faced with listening to somebody with a different opinion, you refuse to engage?  Do you say “No more” rather than “Tell me more”?  Do you only pretend to listen?

• Do you allow dissatisfaction to fester on your teams, blaming only the team members themselves rather than looking at how you might be contributing?  Do you shut down your subordinates who dare to disagree with or challenge you?  Do you hold on to your superiority by staying judgmentally silent? 

• Or maybe you turn to substances to drown out the voice in your head that knows that your outsides don’t match your insides? 

• Or maybe you stay really busy with activities, avoiding real conversations or downtime? 

• Do you exude a false confidence, pretending to know things you do not know, even expressing anger at the implication that you might not know something? 

• Do you push off responsibility for your actions onto those around you, pointing the finger at others rather than accepting your own missteps?

What’s the point of all this avoidance?

While there are just as many reasons to avoid things as there are people and things to avoid, here are a few common examples:

• You want to avoid rejection – Maybe you are afraid of seeing a trait in yourself that you’ve spent a lifetime trying to hide for fear that others will reject you if they catch a glimpse of that trait.   

• You want to avoid failure – Maybe you are afraid of trying something and not succeeding.  What if you go for that new position and don’t get it?  Or worse yet, what if you do get it but find yourself flailing around and not doing it well?

• You want to avoid losing control – Maybe you are afraid of feeling sadness because you believe you will get stuck in that sad feeling forever.  Or maybe you are afraid to feel anger because you’re scared you might hurt someone like you were hurt by someone else’s anger.

• You want to avoid change or instability – Maybe you’re afraid of truly listening to somebody with a different political view or religious belief or life viewpoint because you are afraid of discovering that your beliefs aren’t as solid as you wish they were.  Maybe you believe that you need these beliefs in order to survive.

• You want to avoid being exposed as imperfect – Maybe you’re afraid to look directly at the unhappiness or dysfunction in your teams or families or friendships because you are afraid that exposing and acknowledging them will make them more real somehow.    Or maybe you’re afraid because you honestly don’t have a clue how to go about solving the problems so it feels easier to just pretend they doesn’t exist. 

But I challenge you to consider this:  Does wanting to avoid rejection actually keep you from being rejected?  And does wanting to avoid failure keep you from ever failing?  Does wanting to stay in control actually keep you in control?  Does wanting to avoid change make your life perfectly stable?  And does wanting to avoid being called out as imperfect make you perfect?

Likely not.  At least not all of the time.

Remember the dogs?  My perpetual running from the dogs absolutely did not keep me dog-free.  Quite the opposite.  I had innumerable people tell me through the years that their dog has never chased anyone prior to me.  Dogs were absolutely drawn to me.  Until I stopped running. 

So what might happen if you choose to turn and face even one thing that you are trying to avoid? 

What happens when you stop running?

You will be uncomfortable.  And you will survive.

• You might feel emotions you’ve been avoiding for a lifetime and they will feel uncomfortable and scary.  Then those emotions will naturally run their course and clear the way for something real – maybe even more joy. 

• You might have to hear how you’ve wronged others, however inadvertently.  And this will be uncomfortable.  And this will give you the opportunity to apologize or clear up misunderstandings and strengthen and deepen these relationships, transforming them from superficial to powerful and deep.

• You might have to finally admit some truths about yourself that you’ve spent years trying to hide.  Maybe you finally embrace being an introvert and create space for yourself.  Or you embrace your love for cats or your deep and abiding love for Kenny G.  This will be uncomfortable and scary.  And once you let yourself just be, you will see that you are not universally rejected.  In fact, you will be accepted for who you truly are, rather than who you were trying to be. 

• You might realize that you actually can see and understand the other side of a political or religious argument, even if only just a little.  This will be uncomfortable and scary.  And once you let that armor down, you will see that we are all the same at our core.  You might just come to an understanding that there isn’t your way and their way, but that there was a third way all along. 

• You might see more unhappiness and strife in your team than you ever thought existed, and that will be uncomfortable.  And then you will allow it to surface and then start to heal, creating a stronger, more stable team. 

Yes, it is uncomfortable to face these things that scare you so deeply.  It’s even uncomfortable to admit that they do scare you that much.  And the choice is absolutely yours – only you get to decide whether you turn and face these things.

It is not only a choice – it is your choice.

I could never have dreamed of how much better my life would be once I made the choice to turn and face the dogs, and the fears and all of the distortions I had adopted as truths. 

It was terrifying. 

And I am ridiculously happy that I decided to do it.

I encourage you to also make this choice to turn toward what you have been running from.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.  You won’t regret it.

Which fear will you turn toward first?