“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”

The Bene Gesserit’s Litany Against Fear, from Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I met these words when I was about 11 or 12 years old, not sure exactly when the first time I saw David Lynch’s vision of Dune. It’s the weirdness that Kyle Maclachlan’s character Paul Atreides chants to himself while he is being tortured (“tested”), and it’s one of the bits from the film that stuck out to my young imagination. I read the book after I saw the film, and it plays a much larger part in that world on the page. It’s a meditation of focus that enables characters to brace themselves for some terrible trial and tribulation.

The beauty of it is that it works in the real world, as well.

Words of Power IRL

1. I was scrambling up the side of a low mountain in the neighborhood of Ashland, OR, a lot of dry scrub and desert. I am not especially good with heights. We were walking along a level with a sharp incline. Not exactly a sheer drop but not far off either. I was terrified.

2. I was hiking through the forest around Multnomah Falls with my uncle. The trail we were on had sharp switchbacks, that good ole fear with heights reared its head again. Again, a firm pathway that got me from point A to B, but a sharp drop into pointy sticks that had me shook.

In both of these situations, I shit you not, I repeated the Litany Against Fear like it was the Lord’s Prayer. And, to be honest, it worked like a charm both times. No, the words are not magic, not invisible armor, but I will say that anything that calms your mind in a similar moment of stress and allows you to carry on, that can be said “to work”.

As far as finding safer places to hike, I will defend the decision of both days by saying the views were superb. One simply does not move to Oregon to spend one’s life in a browser.

The mantra sounds 100% crazy to any casual listener, but don’t let it stop you from saying it OUT LOUD. You can practice screaming it at an ashtray, and you should. Know the words. They allow you to acknowledge your fear and its effect on you while envisioning a narrative where the fear has left you, it has passed and you remain intact.

Moments of Terror

Some fear is very straightforward, ala “I will fall from this height and I shall die”, but sometimes it’s a little more nuanced, *especially* when we find ourselves facing fear in the workplace. Fear of failure and fear of replacement are two big ones, especially if we are deeply invested in careers as freelance creatives. You can have a great run of five years that goes down the drain in two bad months. The stakes are high for all of us.

In my own history as a developer, the fall-and-die fear moments revolved around unknowns on a project, questions I was asked that I didn’t quite have an answer for. And there it is: the original fear, how you handle the moment where you have to say, “I don’t know.” They have asked you to build something that you cannot build. They have asked you to do something that you cannot do.

The fear comes in a wave. Self doubt creeps in. You start thinking about all of the other developers out there waiting for this opportunity. You start thinking about that next job that someone else will get because word got out you can’t hack it. That is the moment that fear can win. And that’s when you hit it with the litany.

In the professional moment of fall-and-die, the most dangerous thing that fear can do is cloud your vision as to what is important. As a freelance developer, that always boils down to The Status of the Project. If the issue is equivalent to a fatal flaw, ie “I will not get the job because I cannot do it,” this is something that can be worked out in the opening conversation about the work. The better you frame and sell yourself as a talent, the less likely you are to find yourself in situations where you have to say, “Um, actually, not what I do…”

Under no circumstances should you ever speak to that fear, to the client, regarding project status. Any statement about the project that begins with, “I’m afraid”, is best suited to have a conclusion like, “we still have a little budget left to play around with”. Any statement like, “I am afraid for this project” and you may as well kneecap yourself literally as you have done figuratively.

I Will Face My Fear

The true strength of the piece is in the statement of an individual who will not be moved by negative emotion. Yes, you will be afraid. Yes, the fear will seem enormous. But if we hide from these feelings, if we cower, that becomes the habitual response to fear: loss of control. Using the Litany Against Fear or The Lord’s Prayer or any other mantra of empowerment, if they work, the key is that you are keeping control.

And in the professional framing of this conversation, those moments of fear should always be tempered with the knowledge that no single moment defines your career unless you allow it. The two month disaster in the otherwise sterling five year run can either be a momentary hiccup that you tell stories about, OR it can be the killing blow that brings your career to an end. It all depends on how you deal with those moments of adversity, and how you choose to deal with fear.