Fear Is Your Growth Edge & How To Use It
What color is fear on a stoplight? Hint - it's not Red
I want to talk about fear — not the run-from-a-bear kind, but the quiet kind. The kind that shows up right before something big. The kind that whispers: “What if you fail?” or “What if this changes everything?”
But what if that fear is actually a signal — not to stop, but to start?
I’m a child of the 90s. Where are my geriatric millennials?? The ones in their early 40s who remember life before the internet (remember dial-up?). The ones who played Oregon Trail at school and waited all week for TGIF. Y’all are my people.
Growing up, I was a huge Pauly Shore fan (I know, but no shame … and let’s be real, he played the same character in every movie and we loved it). One film I watched more times than I care to admit was Bio-Dome.
The plot? Two goofy friends, Pauly and Doyle (Stephen Baldwin), accidentally get locked in a high-tech, closed ecological system with five scientists for a full year. Chaos, hijinks, and immature jokes follow. They disrupt important experiments, wreak havoc, but ultimately… they save the day.
Critics hated it. Eleven-year-old me? Obsessed.
But here’s what I didn’t know then: Bio-Dome was loosely inspired by a real place —Biosphere 2, a research facility in Arizona created to test the viability of self-sustaining ecosystems, potentially for use in outer space.
Inside Biosphere 2, scientists planted trees — because of course, trees are vital to any ecosystem. But something strange happened. The trees inside the dome grew faster than normal… but they also kept falling over before reaching full maturity.
Why?
Turns out, there was one thing missing from the Biosphere: wind.
In nature, trees are constantly exposed to wind; everything from gentle breezes, gusty storms, even hurricanes. That wind creates what’s called stress wood. Stress wood makes trees more adaptable and resilient. It’s why you see a tree pushing through concrete or growing sideways off a cliff. That resistance? It’s what makes the tree strong enough to survive.
The trees in the biosphere had everything they needed — sunlight, water, soil, protection. But without wind, they couldn’t withstand anything.
They were growing…but not thriving. Not enduring.
And here’s where it gets good:
What if we are those trees?
What if fear is our version of the wind?
Fear is stress wood for the soul.
It’s what invites us to grow deeper roots. To become stronger. To adapt, bend, and push through the resistance.
Most of us were taught to avoid fear. We label it as bad or unsafe. But what if fear is just a signal that we’ve hit an edge of possibility? An invitation to lean in, not retreat.
In the From Grind to Align framework, fear shows up in The Grind phase as the invisible tether:
Fear of disappointing others.
Fear of being seen.
Fear of losing control or security.
Fear of not being enough.
But in The Bridge, we begin to reframe fear. We learn how to feel safe in expansion. We meet our fear not with panic, but with curiosity. This is where nervous system rewiring and radical self-permission come in. (More on these topics later.)
We start asking:
What is this fear protecting me from?
And… what might it be pointing me toward?
And I get it — fear has met me at every big crossroads:
When I left my corporate job.
When I started over in real estate.
Even now, building this Substack, sharing my voice in public and diving into coaching, I’m still choosing to lean in.
Each time, I was scared. But each time, I got stronger. Because fear wasn’t the sign to stop… it was the invitation to choose myself anyway.
If you want to dive deeper into what The Bridge looks like in real life, check out my previous post, The Resentment Trap — it’s a powerful look at what happens when we stay in grind mode too long, and how we start crossing into alignment.
✨ Reflection:
What am I afraid of right now?
What does that fear reveal about what I truly want?
What would I do if I trusted myself to handle whatever came next?
And one more powerful question to journal on:
Where am I growing fast… but falling over, because I’m avoiding the wind?
Let fear be your teacher — not your jailer.
Let it blow through your life like wind through a forest — challenging, strengthening, preparing you for deeper alignment.
You don’t have to fear fear. You just have to listen to what it’s trying to show you.
✨ If this resonated…
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