My Love Affair with Fear
How Fear Enabled Me to Become Who I Was Created to Be
My Love Affair with Fear is an inspirational memoir about using fear to become stronger.
In his powerful memoir My Love Affair with Fear, Brad Kilb explores how his understanding of his fears helped him succeed in life.
Kilb has researched fear as an educator for fifty-one years, traveling to sixty-seven countries and living in six. He coached the Canadian national volleyball team and professionally in Italy, Switzerland, and Japan, and these experiences helped him to develop an understanding of how to use his fear to his advantage.
Throughout his book, Kilb explains how he faced challenges from multiple directions, including in his relationships with his family, at work, and with numerous health issues that required surgical intervention. He also helped his children through drug and alcohol addictions and permanent brain damage. Drawing on such experiences, he suggests ways of treating fear as an asset, rather than a roadblock.
The book is divided in fourteen parts, each of which focuses on an aspect of fear or confronting it. These include learning to welcome fear, getting comfortable with discomfort, and not letting fear limit one’s potential. The tone of such work is practical, presuming that there are always ways to learn from one’s fear. Volleyball metaphors are frequent: the book treats preparation like a game plan, calling it a crucial step before one jumps into a fearful endeavor. Elsewhere, the book distinguishes between “forced actions,” which are scenarios designed by someone else, and “accepted actions,” which are knowledgeably and personally entered into with the intention of enriching one’s life.
Kilb is not a self-help expert, and his advice is limited by the fact that it draws so much upon his personal experiences and what they meant to him. The book is embellished with numerous pictures and visual memories from Kilb’s story, too. Still, this singular information is shared with the desire to help others mitigate their own situations. In this capacity, the book does an able job of conveying the importance of stepping into fear and taking positive actions. It argues that transformative lessons come amid terrifying moments, and muses ““I don’t want to create boundaries constructed by fear which limit my potential.” References to personal research on fear further illuminate the material.
Written as an example for others who struggle with fear, My Love Affair with Fear is an insightful memoir about understanding the sources of one’s fear and learning from that feeling.
Reviewed by
Anna Maria Colivicchi
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
