By: Desiree Fa

So let’s just imagine for a moment that we’ve time traveled to May 2014. If you were to meet yourself, what kind of person would you be? What stories would you have about the things you’ve done in the previous 8 months? What would you have learned? Let’s fast forward a few more years to 2017. As you’re walking across the stage of the Chan Centre to receive your diploma, what will be the memories flashing through your mind? Will you be proud of the person that you have become? Do you have any regrets?

Now let’s bring it back to the present and think about the things that might stop you from making that future a reality. Something we often don’t consider when asking ourselves why we don’t achieve our goals are our fears. Fear is the emotion that prevents us from taking risks, trying new things, and being ourselves. It causes us to rationalize why we can’t do something.

Sometimes fear is rational – it’s a good thing to be afraid of jumping off a building because that keeps you safe. But more often times than not, our fears are not based on facts. One of the ways to define fear is as an acronym: False Evidence Appearing Real. Fears are simply perceptions that your mind creates based on “what if” situations.

The most common fears we have are of rejection, missing out, and failure. How many times have you given into fear when you hesitated to introduce yourself to that unfamiliar face or when you shied away from raising your hand in lectures? What about that opportunity you didn’t bother applying for because you felt inadequate and figured you wouldn’t get it anyway?

As you embark on your journey at UBC, you carry your own suitcase of fears. Whether they are of rejection, missing out or possibly failing for the first time, how do you face them?

The first step is to realize what your fears are. What’s stopping you from being the person you want to be? Whatever it is, come to terms with it.

Once you’ve realized that you are afraid, the only way to overcome fear is to do the very thing you fear. Fear is an emotion and like all other emotions, it’s not subject to reason. You can’t fight fear with logic or intellectual reasoning – you can only neutralize it by action!

Need motivation to do so? Decide that what you want is way more important than what your fear is, especially the fear of what people will think. Your vision of the optimal university experience can become a reality – you just have to make that decision.

Start today because the person who you will someday be is the person who you are now becoming.