Dethroning the Kings

Making mortals of the immortals

A knight with no sword is a civilian, and a civilian is no threat on the battlefield.

Everybody that knows me would say that I am a fearless man. “Look yonder at that fearless warrior!” They would say. “Nothing phases him! He knows not the face of fear. No foe could shake the foundations of this man’s confidence!” Believe it or not, I have felt fear. I have felt intimidated. I have felt inferior, weak, and helpless. I would even venture to say I’ve felt it more than most. I know the feeling of being the smallest dog in the yard. I have felt panic surge through my veins as I start sizing up everyone around me. You would never believe it based on how I act, but I carried that scared little kid around for years. 

It might sound like I’m trying to confess to living a double life, but that’s not quite what I’m getting at. Deep in my soul is the drive to fix a problem when it arises, so when I started noticing how intimidated I felt by people, I immediately set to work. I started by taking some time to understand the problem. If you don’t get to know your enemy, you have no hope of defeating them. As I began making my observations, I noticed something peculiar: somewhere down the line, I had come to the conclusion that everyone was perfect except me.I realized this gap was holding my self-esteem down.Supposedly, I was the only one on the planet making mistakes. I was the only one with flaws. Everyone else was perfectly functional, and I was the only one fumbling and tumbling like a newborn fawn. 

The antidote to this fear swiftly followed. In order to diminish my own fear, I must see everyone else’s imperfections. I need to bridge the canyon between myself and them. To do this, I started picking one flaw in every person I felt intimidated by. My all-powerful boss doesn’t want to work very hard, my all-knowing coworker is a hothead, and my impenetrably confident friend is always grumpy. As I pointed out these faults to myself, I felt a deep shift begin in my brain. People no longer scared me. I’m still wise to their power, influence, and how things might turn out if I messed with them, but they no longer terrified me. This trick has done wonders, but I want to make a few things clear as I turn it into advice for you. 

First, stick to only finding one fault in someone. If you go overboard, the fear won’t be pacified, it will just have a new weapon. Your brain will start trying to make everyone seem as worthless as possible in hope of remedying the fear that isn’t going away. It may even take you as far as trying to belittle others. That’s not helpful to anyone. Not only are you trying to combat the mindset, but the energy with which that mindset comes. In other words, you aren’t just trying to combat the thoughts produced by fear, but the heart-pounding, fast-breathing energy that comes with it. You need to start to slow down, and find your sense of peace. 

Second, these are insights for you and you alone. Sure, you might be able to use a thing or two to your advantage from time to time, but that isn’t the point of this trick. All you really need to do is to retrain your brain to see that nobody is perfect. As you work at this, your brain will naturally start to correct itself. The point is you don’t need to actively make other people feel worse about themselves in order to be less intimidated by them. You don’t even need to see them as much less than they already are to make this work. You just need to shift from seeing people as perfect, to being imperfect. They’re fellow humans, not immortal deities. 

I hope this bit of advice finds you well. My prayer for you is that you develop this skill so that you can continue on your conquest without the fear of others standing in your way. May you learn to embrace competition, seeing it as an opportunity for luminous growth. I pray you learn to live a life without fear of those who surround you, seeing others as mortal giants, rather than immortal deities.

Until next we meet

May peace be with you.