Laurie:  Either I’m booking fantastic guests or my listening skills are getting better, but I’m really learning a lot about myself on my Monday night Coach World TV.  The latest revelation is that pretty much everything I do (or don’t do) is motivated/stymied by FEAR.   Yeah, tough-talking, world-weary, New York City-jaded me has a comfy cozy relationship with fear.

 elizabeth: A little fear is good. I am afraid of the dark (don’t get behind me and scream “boo” – well, don’t attempt it after I had 48 ounces of water to drink)) and I hate most every superhighway there is in the world.  Was in a car in Italy and those drivers all have a death wish. Do they think the Pope will administer last rites to them personally and then have St. Peter deliver them to the pearly gates? Fear is good. When you are walking down a dark alleyway (and why are we doing this?) and one of the cast from Jersey Shore walks over to you with a tire iron in his hands, you know you best be on your way. Oh wait, that is fear of becoming stupid by association. A biggie fear in my book.

 Laurie:  The Today Show had a segment called Tech Savvy or Tech Scared?  I definitely fall into the latter category.  My computer maintenance plan is prayer, as in “please let everything be just the way I left it last night.”  I haven’t been bothering the Big Guy quite as much since I found a techie with a 12-inch bright red Mohawk who seems to know what he is doing.  My doormen tentatively call up and identify him as “the computer guy.”  When I say okay, they say “really?” So he has a bullet hanging out of his ear; you got a problem with that?  I’m at peace knowing his little studded computer head is out there.  But I can whip out a tech prayer in a heartbeat.  Let that little cursor freeze, and the spiritual appeals begin.

 elizabeth: You bring up two big fears here. Fear of computers or almost anything that needs to be plugged in, turned on and sweet talked to (sounds like what we do to men?).  I recite the “I will give up this and that if my computer starts without a problem” prayer drenched in fear every morning.  But the other fear comes from the nasty boogey man called ignorance. It took me years to embrace that I am different than other people. It goes all the way back to when Mister Sperm caught the eye of Miss Egg and, viola, nine months later I showed up on the scene. Not a dull moment since then for people who get me to the scardey cats who think I am a carrier of some sort of plague. So bring on the 12-inch red Mohawks and the boys who don black eyeliner and the girls with tattoos or no hair and embrace them. We could do away with this fear after watching just one episode of American Idol. Not enough time to talk about the fear of singing off key.

 Laurie:  I also drive from the far side of fear.  My husband once said that “You drive like you don’t want to be hit.”  Now personally I don’t see a damn thing wrong with that, but in New York City the timid do seem to get swallowed up by the taxi cabs and end up going nowhere fast.  Sure, I could have hit the little old lady taking an hour to cross the street, sideswiped the guy on a bike, and cut off the guy with Jersey plates, and then I would have been in front of everybody at the stoplight.  Somehow it just doesn’t seem worth it.  But I will confess that I truly believe if I speak nicely to my car when I get in it, that’s a guarantee that it will start with no problems.  Hey, so far, so good.

 elizabeth: I actually pat my car’s dashboard and say, “Please don’t try to kill me today and I promise I will do the same thing for you.”

 Laurie:   Of course there are deeper, more meaningful affiliations with fear but I have no intention of revealing them here.  And yep, you can chalk that up to a Fear of Blackmail from elizabeth.

 elizabeth: Oh yeah. Like I have a picture of a gun pointed at your head. And you won’t believe this but one of my cats just sat on the computer’s dashboard and it started to talk. Sounded like Edgar Allen Poe. Okay. What I think he would sound like. So now I have the fear of having a computer that is possessed. Laurie- please send phone number of Mohawk guy.

 So when facing the fear, who leads?

  © 2010, Coaches on the Edge ™

 If you would like to learn more about Laurie, please go to her site: Empowered Life Journeys.

Stop by at elizabeth’s site at: Branching Out Life Coaching