COPING WITH FEAR

Dealing with a cancer diagnosis is one thing but facing the daily fear that it might just come back again can be debilitating. There are ways to manage this anxiety to help you cope better.

Resilience and Recovery Coach, Sinead Scott-Lennon, asks a series of coaching questions to get you thinking about your fear from a different perspective. Take some time for yourself to take a listen and explore the answers that come up for you. Let us know how you get on.

Sinead’s top tips for managing fear are:

1. Acknowledge and Face your fear- look it in the eye
2. Look at the evidence about what you’re most afraid of
3. Be OK with the discomfort
4. Be proud of your story and how brave you are
5. Surround yourself with good people who allow you to talk about your fears
6. Mindfulness and breathing
7. Physical  exercise

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Sinead's Story

I became a Coach a little bit by accident. It sort of just happened and rather than searching for it, it kind of found me.

Like all human beings I have had wonderful stints but I have also had some deeply difficult times. My heart has been broken repeatedly by some of the challenges that life presented to me but somehow I have been able to maintain my dignity, positivity and strength and in fact embrace these challenges as war wounds that form a very big part of who I am. I realised after five years of punishing fertility treatment, cancer in my family, my own breast cancer, miscarriage, the pandemic and redundancy all in relentless succession that there was something interesting going on with the way that I had been coping. I was resilient and I recovered. Every time another blow came. Why was that? Did I have this from childhood or did I learn it? As I questioned this further through my own coaching journey it began to dawn on me that my path to resilience and recovery is a combination of who I am but that I also learned it at each stage of my life. I also learned that each and every one of us goes through deeply challenging times along the way and it is sometimes really hard to find ways of coping, especially when life and work must continue. Not one of us is immune to trauma and pain.

On a professional level, I have always felt a little unfulfilled in my job roles (20 years in Communications). Not because I didn’t love some of the work I was doing and especially the people I met along the way, but because I have a deep need to work with people in a more meaningful way. In each job role I found myself always gravitating to mentoring, nurturing and people development. I also found myself being ‘that’ person in my personal life. Often on the end of the phone to a friend or family member with an obstacle to tackle. It never ever feels like duty or a drain, in fact it’s a privilege to witness people come to conclusions and decisions that make their lives better.

The journey may not always be easy but true resilience is found when we find the courage to look at difficulty in the eye and face up to it. How do I know that? Because I did it myself when I thought that life could not get more difficult. It is arguably the best gift I have ever given myself.