Kindness is the Fear Killer
and a natural stress reliever
How many times have you stood up in front of an audience and got nervous. You started to be afraid and scared of what people would think about what you were going to say or of their judgement against your performance. You started to feel inadequate to the point where you even didn’t think you should get on with you needed to do.
I certainly had had these ‘episodes’ many times in my life. Often I managed to overcome them, but there were moments when I didn’t do very well and even ended up disastrous (I still have nightmares about this).
Ok I know, there are many practical things or techniques that you need/can do to mitigate this problems. People are giving courses to teach you about this. Just today I saw one from Simon Sinek.
But I was reading something recently which I found it very interesting. It’s something new and profound that I haven’t heard before.
The TL;DR is this: “Kindness is the Fear Killer”
It’s a quote from a book by my favourite writer A.G. Riddle titled ‘Quantum Radio’.
The scene was set at the time when the protagonist was still young, he was an introvert who liked science and he had to do some presentation at school. As we all had probably experienced when we were at that age, our hero here had a fear of speaking in front of his peers.
Then his mother, who was a scientist, tried to calm him down by using some scientific facts. Here are the quotes from the section of the page:
“There’s a simple trick to controlling your fear of public speaking. It uses psychology and neuroscience”
“… there’s a way to essentially dampen that innate fear response in your amygdala. And luckily, it comes naturally to you: kindness and generosity. When we’re kind and helpful to others, it calms the fight-or-flight response in our brains.”
“Kindness is a natural stress reliever.”
“It puts our minds in a different place. When we change our attitude, it changes how our brain reacts. We’re not on the defensive. We’re on the offense — and we’re doing the offense to help others. That’s a deep well of strength.”
“Kindness is the Fear Killer”
Personally I always knew that kindness is one important principal we need to always remember in everything that we do, but having it explained in such scientific manner, it was an eye-opener.
So next time you feel scare to do something, just remember that you are doing it to help others.
The important thing is that you are doing (have done) your part, and the rest is up the them.