Book Review: On Becoming Fearless

Non-fiction

On Becoming Fearless…in Love, Work, and Life

Arianna Huffington

Little Brown and Company

September 2006

Pages 230

ISBN:-13:978-0-316-16681-2

Price: $21.99

First Things First 

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Arianna Huffington, author of On Becoming Fearless, ran against Arnold Schwarenegger for governor of California in 2003. She switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party. Huffington’s ex-husband, Michael, revealed in a magazine article following their divorce that he is bisexual. Her piece of the web: The Huffington Post.

All right, everybody good? Let’s move on.

What We Fear 

“Whatever it is that frightens you has frightened someone before you.”

It is a simple, powerful statement and the premise of a book that speaks directly to the issues that make women’s knees buckle. Those issues are intimate: love, parenting, our bodies, work, leadership, and a woman’s power to change the world. We all seek out ways to combat the fear that paralyzes us frequently and this book is a definite step towards resolving that fear. Huffington has not written a self-help book. This is not a step-by-step instructional manual on attaining instant courage. It is a conversation about a chief aliment among women. The author facilitates this conversation in the manner in which women everywhere communicate—she shares.

Each chapter highlights a subject (leadership, death, spirituality, etc.) and Huffington recounts personal experiences about her struggles as a woman, mother, and professional. She proclaims her own mother as her role model. The author also enlists friends and acquaintances to tell their stories of acknowledgement, confrontation, change, and acceptance of what has frightened them in their lives. There are more suggestions than firm advice. The reader is challenged to think about her own situation in light of revelations of other women.

Now, it is easy to become distracted by the women Huffington features in the book. These women are Nobel Prize winners, CEO’s, politicians, heads of commercial and non-profit businesses. It’s an intimidating roster until you take a deeper look at their experiences. Their fears are the same as every woman. On Becoming Fearless suggests that the difference between the fearless woman and the woman paralyzed by her fear is not socioeconomics, race, education, or marital status. The difference is that the fearless woman does not allow the fear to stop her. She moves forward trembling knees, sweaty palms, nagging inner voice and all. Huffington shows that fearlessness is only attained on the moving side of action.

Overcoming Our Fears 

“Squashing our true selves is a major cause of fear, anxiety, and depression.”

Huffington reports that humans have four instincts: survival, power, sex, and spirituality. She tackles each of them in her survey of the areas in women’s lives where fear rears up and strikes. She encourages introspection to fish out true desires and wants, the causes of fear. The author also suggests not taking

oneself too seriously, because the flaws we obsess over simply aren’t that important to other people. And it is other people that women tend to stress over the most. Huffington and the women whose voices share space in this piece describe incidents in which they were consumed with what others thought of them and how time and experience as well as age brought them to a point where other people’s perceptions of them no longer held the same weight. The discussions on aging were especially encouraging as the author suggests so much of what consumes women in their younger years simply does not as the years pass. Acceptance of oneself as is reoccurs as a theme throughout the book.

Living a Fearless Life 

“Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. Rather, it’s the mastery of fear.”

Huffington stresses that becoming fearless is a life long, on-going process. There is no one mantra, yoga pose, or secret pill that can lead to the achievement of fearlessness. Even so, the author makes it clear that all women are capable of achieving this level of being in the world.

This book cannot be read quickly. It’s not the length, but the content that slows you down whether you want to or not. Huffington gets to the bone of what women as a species struggle with, so every category of fear she writes about is known personally, thus demanding reflection.

On Becoming Fearless is a work that is not to be consumed once and put on the shelf. It is to be kept on the nightstand in ready reach for when life beats at our continuing efforts at building courage.

Melissa Levine

for

The Martini Lounge

www.martini-lounge.com