How Fear Creates a Handicap in Your Life, Leadership, and Relationships

So, I was just thinking about how fear creates a handicap in a person’s life. Man, this is wild.

Fear turns certain aspects of your life into self-protection mode. It limits your freedom and capability in different areas.

It’s as simple as a person being afraid of snakes and agreeing with fear that snakes are impossible to be around, or that if they get too close at all, they’ll get bitten, that something terrible will happen to them. Fear creates an illusion of potential harm that is greater than the truth.

Now, when that person goes with their family on a family hike, they’re already on a heightened sense of alert because they know there could be a snake. If there is a snake and people identify it — “Hey, there’s a snake over here” — that person is even more limited in how they interact with that snake because of fear that’s unrealistic. So, they’re handicapped by fear.

When that fear is a fear of confrontation or an emotional reaction from somebody, a person can be handicapped or limited in how they interact with people.

“I don’t talk to so-and-so about X, Y, Z because I don’t want to deal with the emotional outburst.”

By listening to fear, I limit my capabilities and my willingness to do certain things. Therefore, I’m handicapped.

Here’s something God showed me about fear’s effects on our thoughts and behavior patterns.

I’m not a golfer, but there was a time in my military career when my unit held a golf tournament. It was a fun golf tournament, nothing serious. 

We went and played several holes of golf to capture baseline scores. From that baseline, we were all given individual handicaps based on the guys who did the best. That put us in range to compete in the tournament.

The way they gave us our handicap was by giving us each a certain length of string based on our baseline scores (lowest scores – longest string). For example: someone who scored well might get six inches of string while others receive two feet, six feet or nine feet because their scores needed a much larger handicap. We’d hit our ball, and once it got on the green, we’d measure the string from the ball to the cup. If the ball was within the length of our string, it counted as being in the cup.

That was our handicap. We needed a tool to make us competitive where we weren’t competitive before. When a person is dealing with fear—fear-driven speech, leadership, or lifestyle—they become handicapped. They need a tool to be competitive.

What happens next is they begin to manipulate someone else who isn’t handicapped so they can meet the competitiveness of that area of their life.

If you’ve ever met someone who’s always dependent on you to do something they’re perfectly capable of doing, it’s probably because fear has them handicapped in that area of their life.

If it’s annoying to think that someone fully grown has no real reason to need you to do certain things, this is probably why. Fear is having a tremendous impact on that person’s life, causing a handicap and a need for a tool.

When it gets bad, a person affected by fear seriously enough will stop seeing you as a human being with inherent value. They begin to see you as nothing more than a tool.

This is where it becomes unhealthy—super unhealthy.

If you buy a tool and bring it home and it doesn’t function the way it was manufactured and marketed to function, you’re going to be frustrated with that tool. You’ll treat it in ways you wouldn’t if it worked properly and delivered value.

If it worked right, you’d take care of it. You’d put it back in its container after each use. You’d be careful with it. That’s how you should treat a person.

A person has inherent value because they’re human. They’re not a product (a tool).

But a person who obeys fear and accepts a handicap begins to see people as tools, not humans. That’s where they get toxic disregard for who you are. They don’t see you for who you are anymore. They see you as a tool that helps them compete in their handicap space.

That’s why people deeply bound to fear become extremely needy. In healthy relationships, companionship keeps loneliness away. But in this situation, the person believes you’re a tool, not a human. You can be in the same room, in close proximity, and still feel lonely because they’re not engaging with you as an equal human. They’re engaging with you like a tool.

I can go into my garage and tinker with something while a tool I don’t need sits on a shelf. I’d be upset if I looked over and it wasn’t there. I’d say, “who took my tool?” I might run around the house asking everyone, “Where’s my drill?”

But I don’t care for the drill. I don’t hug it or talk to it. I put it back on the shelf.

That’s how a person in that role starts to feel lonely. They’re treated like the tool that should be in its place on a shelf and ready when needed.

This is why people feel trapped in these relationships. The person wants the tool there but doesn’t want engagement with it unless they need it.

You see this in families, but you also see this in companies, businesses, and management structures. Someone finds themselves in a leadership role, and because they’re obeying fear, they start engaging with people like tools.

That’s why you get managers who talk down to people, who are harsh and unkind. Leadership training talks about the need to have tact when you communicate, but it often ignores the fact that the person is listening to fear, not leadership wisdom.

Those leadership ideals are great, but they mean nothing if you don’t solve the problem of fear. The individual must recognize that the voice in their mind is not them. It’s external. It’s fear.

If you observe people and situations long enough, you’ll see fear at the root. But in the moment, people are emotionally caught off guard. They don’t recognize fear. They just see someone treating them badly.

What’s really happening is they’re being treated like a tool, and the other person is frustrated because the tool isn’t doing what they want.

But the tool is human. Humans do human things, not tool things.

That frustration feeds control. Control feeds toxic behavior. The person listening to fear becomes addicted to moments where they feel powerful.

They need others to validate them because they know, deep down, they’re compensating for a handicap.

Some people in life don’t need much of a handicap. Others need nine feet of string to reach the cup. The person listening to fear doesn’t want to believe that.

So, they work to control the narrative, to get people to say good things about them, to feel competitive. That entire cycle is fear-driven.

We all need recognition sometimes. That’s healthy. But it should motivate growth, not reduce others to being treated as tools.

We can fix this by addressing our own obedience to fear. We can tell fear he’s intruding, that he’s making us less effective and damaging our relationships.

This is how fear-driven people end up isolated. They’re afraid to be seen, afraid to be exposed, afraid to be human.

They’ll also sabotage high performers around them, feeding fear into them to level the field.

Fear must feel superior.

But fear is not from us. Fear is not us. Fear is external, manipulating lives.

If we get fed up with that and decide fear is not welcome—in our lives, our relationships, our decisions—we don’t have to listen anymore.

We don’t have to listen to fear.

We can tell fear to leave, grow in the areas where we’ve been handicapped, and stop letting fear define how we live.

And we can do all of that in the name of Jesus.

Further Reading:

Building Readiness into your life

Fear as laziness