by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Fear Of the Unknown is a Reflection of Your Capacity To Trust Yourself and Life (Do Your Best & Let Go of the Rest)
One of the biggest fears for most human beings is the fear of the unknown, the uncertain, and the unfamiliar (all really just different shades of the same thing: chaos):
This is ultimately because the things we can’t predict, control, or fit into the neat little mental boxes we’ve created to make ‘sense’ of reality represent everything that we don’t yet know and potentially don’t want to find out about – in other words, they represent the opportunity of some new truth that we’re not necessarily ready to face (and, as I like to say, the truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable)).
At the end of the day, human beings have evolved to survive and so our ancestors needed to pay attention to uncertainty because the unknown could represent literal threat and danger – for example, a strange sound in the bushes could mean a sabre-toothed tiger was on the prowl, an unfamiliar environment could mean risk, and a lack of information could genuinely be the difference between life and death.
In modern life, however this ancient survival mechanism – like many other instances of our obsolete biological wiring – often becomes something that limits us and stops our growth into REALNESS rather than protecting us.
When you boil it down to the raw basics, the truth about life as a human being is this:
Life ALWAYS contains an element of the unknown – as in, literally always. There will never be a moment where everything is completely predictable, controllable, or guaranteed.
What this means is that we can make plans, develop new skills, cultivate new personal qualities, and gather increasing amounts of information to be as ‘prepared’ as we possibly can be we can never remove uncertainty completely.
If we want to grow REAL and live the best lives we possibly can with the time that we have then we have to acknowledge this fundamental truth:
This article is about the idea that the unknown is not a problem to eliminate but a reality to embrace.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Fear of the Unknown: What We'll Cover In This Article
- The Fear Of the Unknown is a Reflection of Your Capacity To Trust Yourself and Life (Do Your Best & Let Go of the Rest)
- The Strange Place Between Order and Chaos
- The Shadow Dance: Why We Actually Fear Uncertainty
- Control Freakery: The Ego’s Attempt to Avoid Shame
- The Unknown Is Not What We Fear
- Moving From Fear to Trust
- The Final Word: Trust the Unknown to Become Your Teacher
The Strange Place Between Order and Chaos
The unknown reveals something pretty fascinating about the human experience which is that we’re always caught in a weird grey area between opposing forces (I guess those ancients were onto something when they started talking about yin and yang).
What this looks like for most of us on the average day is being in a place somewhere between order and chaos, between control and surrender, and between ego and realness.
The unknown exists at the border between these worlds which is why it can sometimes seem so threatening.
Let’s explore this a little more:
Order and Chaos
One reason we fear the unknown is because it represents everything outside of the little ‘box’ of order that we’ve created for ourselves.
We all create these boxes and use them to function in the world every day of our lives:
- Our beliefs.
- Our interpretations.
- Our assumptions about who we are and how life works.
- Our stories and projections about who we are, what other people are like, and what should happen next.
It goes without saying that these structures are useful and provide functional value because without some sense of order, we’d struggle to make our ways through life and to know what we were doing with our lives in any meaningful way.
The problem begins to arise, though, when we mistake our personal interpretation of ourselves, the world, and reality for reality itself.
The ego (which is really just the self-image we’ve created to deal with life) loves certainty and the illusion of everything making ‘sense’ and being understood because this false ‘order’ allows it to keep its hold over us (i.e. we won’t have to grow and let go of our cherished illusions about things).
This is a flawed strategy in the long term because life is always so much BIGGER than just one fragmented human being’s fragmented interpretation of things.
This is because we all live behind the Veiled Veil of fragmented perception (our bodies are incapable of perceiving everything in its wholeness) and we also have fragmented interpretations of what we perceive (because of our own emotional and mental blocks).
The long and short of all this is that there will always be something we can’t predict and that challenges the structures we’ve built for ourselves because there will always be a gap between our perceptions and interpretations and the TRUTH.
We don’t ‘like’ the unknown because it reminds us that our map of reality is not the territory itself and this causes a kind of cognitive (and emotional) dissonance.
Control and Surrender
The unknown also causes our flabbers to be gasted because it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that we don’t have complete control over ourselves and our lives.
Again, this is one of the deepest fears of the ego because the ego wants to believe that if it just thinks enough, plans enough, achieves enough, performs enough, or controls enough then it can finally create a permanent sense of safety.
Nice idea but – like we said – most ‘control’ is ultimately an illusion:
We can influence, we can respond, and we can participate in life but what we can never do is dominate life itself (no matter how much the ego wants to be omniscient and omnipotent so it can do so).
Life is always bigger than the ego and the control structures we create as extensions of the ego which is why the unknown asks us some potentially challenging questions:
Can you participate in life without trying to force life?
Can you take action without needing guarantees and being outcome-dependent?
Can you do your best and let go of the rest whilst staying emotionally stable?
It’s at this stage that surrender enters the picture – not as a form of passive resignation or giving up but and active form of ACCEPTANCE of how reality actually ‘works’ (and, trust me, real always works).
Real surrender is recognising that there is a force bigger than yourself (well, your ego, at least) and learning to move with it rather than constantly fighting against it.
Ego and Realness
Finally, the unknown represents a threat to the ego because the ego is always the opposite of reality and the unknown always has the potential to bring more reality into your life.
One way to look at the ego is that it’s built on the Illusion of Separation – in other words, it creates a fragmented identity based on what we think we ‘should’ be, what we believe we need to ‘prove’, and what we are afraid others might discover about us.
Reality, however, is always asking us to return to what is actually true and the truth threatens anything that has been built on illusion….this is why the unknown feels so uncomfortable – it’s because it represents the possibility that our carefully constructed identity might not be as solid as we believed.
The Shadow Dance: Why We Actually Fear Uncertainty
To understand this very human fear of the unknown, then, we need to understand the relationship between the ego and the shadow self:
The quickest way to talk about this is to say that the ego and the shadow are always engaged in a kind of “Shadow Dance” where the ego attempts to maintain a certain image of who we are and the shadow contains all of the ‘parts’ of ourselves that we’ve rejected, judged, or decided are unacceptable in order to allow the ego to uphold the illusion.
The ‘fuel’ that underpins this entire process is SHAME (the core belief/assumption that “I am not good enough as I am”).
Shame causes us to stop accepting ourselves and to start judging ourselves instead of looking at ourselves with compassion and curiosity and realising that life is a constant learning journey.
It has an army of ‘Gremlins’ that whisper things to us that sound like this:
- “I shouldn’t be like this”.
- “I shouldn’t feel this”.
- “I shouldn’t want this”.
- “I shouldn’t have this weakness”.
- Etc. etc. etc. – anything that takes us away from the TRUTH which is that “It is what it is and I am what I am“).
When we judge ‘parts’ of ourselves and sent them into exile in the Shadow Territory then they don’t just disappear – instead they go into hiding and become part of the Shadow Self and the unlived life that an expression of this represents.
Over time – as we continue to suppress these parts – then this just creates more and more inner and outer fragmentation as we become disconnected from the truth and become increasingly divided against ourselves.
The end result of all this is that we’re no longer fully rooted in reality and instead find ourselves living in the Void.
Control Freakery: The Ego’s Attempt to Avoid Shame
When we become fragmented and divided in ourselves like this and our lives are beating to the drum of the Shadow Dance then we naturally become more shame-driven.
There are many ways this can show up but one of the most common – and most relevant to our relationship with uncertainty in this article – is Control Freakery:
Control freakery is the ego’s attempt to maintain power over the world (and the people within it) so that shame is never triggered because – if shame is triggered and we’re forced to actually face it – then we eventually discover and have to re-integrate the shadow self.
This is ‘bad’ news for the ego (which is really just a filter between ourselves and ourselves and ourselves and life) because we integrate the shadow self, we no longer need the ego in its current defensive form.
This is why in the face of the unknown, the ego fights to survive, tries to control everything, tries to predict everything, tries to remove every possible risk, and tries to guarantee outcomes – it’s all about keeping shame at bay so we can keep fuelling the ego (even though, paradoxically, this means that unresolved shame is driving us – if we could just face it, it would dissolve).
Ultimately, the ego’s strategy won’t work because every attempt to completely control life is destined to fail because life itself is always bigger than our strategies and systems:
The unknown always returns, the unexpected always arrives, and uncontrollable always reveals itself – not because life is against us but because life is REAL (and so are we when we accept it and take real action instead of trying to control it).
The Unknown Is Not What We Fear
All of this brings us to something that can help you to start overcoming your fear of the unknown and it goes like this:
When people fear the unknown, they’re not actually afraid of the unknown itself – after all, how could they possibly be if they don’t even ‘know’ what it is that they’re afraid of and the fear isn’t directed at anything specific?
Instead of being fearful of some specific ‘thing’, what actually happens when the ‘Unknown’ triggers our fear is that we’re projecting our own internal fragmentation into the empty space that the unknown represents.
In other words, the unknown becomes a blank canvas and the ego paints it’s fear onto it (and we wonder why we’re scared).
Examples of ‘painting’ onto the unknown like this are things like:
- “This is going to go wrong”.
- “I won’t be able to handle it”.
- “I’m not enough”.
- “Something terrible will happen”.
- Etc. etc. etc.
None of these thoughts are not accurate predictions of what’s actually going on in reality – they’re just projections of what’s already going on inside us.
In short:
The unknown represents the truth that we can’t control everything and that the ego is not the centre of reality which is exactly why the ego fears it: the unknown represents the possible return to realness.
If you want to go deeper into embodying and living trust then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Moving From Fear to Trust
The way we overcome the fear of the unknown is not by trying to eliminate uncertainty (which is impossible) but by learning to reconnect with ourselves and life at the level of truth (which is how we overcome the Void).
This happens through the process of:
Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego), Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow), and Action.
(You can read more about this in some of my books or I can walk you through it in one of my coaching containers).
Let’s dig a little deeper (again):
Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego
The first step is to develop Awareness of where you’re trying to control the uncontrollable – for example:
Where are you forcing what can only flow?
Where are you demanding certainty before taking action?
Where are you creating elaborate and unreal stories about the future because you don’t trust yourself to be real in the present?
Awareness allows you to see the ego’s strategies instead of automatically obeying them – in other words, it starts to give you your CHOICE back.
Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow
The second step is Acceptance which means learning to welcome back the parts of yourself that you’ve rejected and sent into the Shadow Territory:
These ‘parts’ can comprise of all kinds of things that are both ‘good’ and bad’ but nevertheless REAL and part of who you are in wholeness instead of fragmentation.
For example:
- The emotions.
- The fears.
- The insecurities.
- The wounds.
- The parts of ourselves that we decided were unacceptable even though they’re strengths or ‘good’ qualities
(Carl Jung himself said that 90% (or something like that) of the shadow is pure gold).
When we stop fighting ourselves and life then we stop needing the ego to constantly defend us from our imaginary battles against life – instead, we can focus on integration, integration creates wholeness, and wholeness creates trust.
Action: Trust Yourself and Trust Life
The final step is to take real Action:
At the end of the day, Realness requires us to move forward despite uncertainty – not because we know exactly what will happen but because we trust ourselves to handle whatever happens.
The formula is simple:
Do your best and let go of the rest – “doing your best” is self-trust and “letting go of the rest” is life-trust.
When you cultivate the muscle of trusting like this then you can trust yourself to show up and do what you CAN do and trust life to handle what is beyond your control to do what you CAN’T do.
When you put yourself in this state then the “Unknown” is no longer a problem to fear but an opportunity to LIVE.
The Final Word: Trust the Unknown to Become Your Teacher
Ultimately, the less capable we are of trusting ourselves and life, the more we’ll fear the unknown – not because our fear is really about what might happen but because of our ingrained belief that we can’t trust ourselves to be able to handle what happens.
When we step up and work to (re)build a foundation of realness within ourselves then everything changes because we finally trust ourselves to do what we can do and trust life to do what we can’t.
The unknown, then, is no longer your enemy but your teacher and it can only ever ‘teach’ you something that makes you more REAL.
Every uncertain moment becomes an invitation to grow, every challenge becomes an opportunity to deepen trust, and every unknown becomes a doorway back to ourselves and life.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to step up and grow real so you can face yourself and life with trust then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you uncover your next moves.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
