Fear is fear. But fear attached to self preservation, life safety, is different than other fear. What's the other fear for? How can we reframe this fear to be useful? How can we unpack our fears, the story we tell ourselves about failure, ridicule and embarrassment to help make things better?
Fear is crafty. It distracts us and paralyzes us. Fear tells us our better might not be good enough, no matter what. Fear doesn't care what's really good enough or better. Fear only cares about getting us to stop. That's its primary job, to shut things down in order to make us feel safe. Fear doesn't discriminate. It only works harder when life safety is on the line. Otherwise, it treats all uncertainty with extreme caution and works to diminish it, to create a safe harbor.
The unknown is scary precisely because it's unknown. Left to its own devices, our fear of the unknown uses our past experience, or worse, someone else's experience, or even a made-up experience to generate a fictional story of our future self as a failure. The presentation surely won't be good enough. The speech will most certainly sound dumb. The essay can't possible make a clear point. Fear generates a horror story, perhaps our worst nightmare, and puts it in front of us, especially when it senses we lack confidence. It gets us to believe in the worst possible outcome, despite any evidence to the contrary, or no evidence at all.
But, if we can acknowledge what's really at stake, that we aren't going to be eaten by a lion, or die at the hand of an enraged audience, or never find work again because the board didn't like our talk, we can enlist fear to help us. We can use fear to serve as a catapult, to help us act, and to make something better. We can even use fear as a signal to dig deeper, to work extra hard, to do the thing which scares us because it scares us, not despite it.
We can't make fear go away. But we can choose not to believe the story it's trying to sell us, because unlike fear, we can distinguish reality from fable. Go sit over there...and watch this.