“Because I teach seminars on facing fear, I naturally have thought a lot about how we as humans transcend fear. The conclusion I came to was that we can’t completely eliminate fear for we can never know everything. So the name of the game is to transmute fear from a paralyzing force into a motivating force rather than wasting time trying to suppress it or transcend it. A small percentage of your fears are real and should be respected. They are valuable. They keep you safe and motivate you into action. But the vast majority of your fears are just negative dialogue that dribbles from the mind. The way to work with that is to begin to talk to the fear as if it were another person. So you say, ‘Thank you, I appreciate that possibility you have just offered me. However, given the current circumstances of my life, I do not accept that negative possibility as a reality in my life. Further, the idea of my being eaten by a wild animal here at the bus station is a little remote. But thank you anyway and ciao, baby.’”

— Stuart Wilde, “The Secretes of Life”