Keeping our natural and thus realizable, achievable ability to choose our response to change and the unexpected can give us a rather boundless feeling of confidence in our ability to cope. We can feel resilient, ready to say "Yes" to life whatever happens. In that our interview class discussion arose from the fear that most students reported about facing the interview, we looked at how this confidence would help us face such a situation.
Students reported that they feared interviews because an interview always felt like unknown territory. Part of our study of the interview meant to dispel that unknown quality, but the idea of fear at facing the unknown deserved our attention in any case. Perhaps the fear stemmed from some unquestioned meaning perspective that most of us held about the interview and ourselves. Such perspectives can become clear to us when we critically reflect on them. In that sense, it called for our use of "metacognition," the metacognitive approach that we entered into before. We wanted and needed to think about our own thinking.
Most of my students did not know that word, and when we defined metacognition as thinking about our thinking. Students generally rejected the idea that they did that at first. When we saw it in an everyday light, that rejection changed. When we say to ourselves, "I am thirsty—I need a Coke," we experienced a feeling, thirst, and a thought in response, "need Coke." Simply by looking at the phrase in that way, we achieve a critical reflection and a metacognitive point of view. Thirst, we see, comes to us as a natural response to a direct feeling. Needing a Coke comes to us as a choice of response to that feeling. When we ask, "why a coke?" we critically reflect metacognitively on that question. Why indeed? Coke costs money. It may not really quench thirst but leave us wanting more. It's full of sugar we'd be better off without, and it's a brand name which costs much more than the same thing in a generic form. Water would work better. Why a Coke, indeed. The "Coke" part of this internal response stemmed from an unquestioned meaning perspective about the relationship between a natural function and a widely advertised and normatively accepted product: "It's the real thing" unlike unreal thing water. Our critical reflection on the meaning perspective can free us to make a freer choice in answering such a basic need—no Coke need apply.
We already knew from the images of the interview the students drew or imagined that they felt as powerless as a child in front of an adult in anticipating an interview. They felt vulnerable. They felt afraid. Critical reflection on our fear of the unknown can bring us to a choice about that fear that seemed unnatural to many. Fear is a feeling, they said, and so it just happens: "We can't choose how we feel. Can we?" We could and did. They said that fear of the unknown rose out if the idea of the unknown itself. That settled it for most of them. It did, sort of. It explained a thing was that thing because—it was that thing. Fear of the unknown happened because the unknown is fearful. Such a definition didn't say anything much about how fear works or comes to be in the first place. The unknown could just as easily come to us offering wonderful possibilities and gifts. Indeed, we read a book or go into a movie in hopes that the unknown will do just that. When we enter a new restaurant, we feel excitement in anticipation not fear of the unknown there. The unknown forms an open space of possibility, undefined, yet we make a choice to fear its possibilities. Like a child in the dark, we fear the unknown because we project something into it as does the child into the dark. Whatever we project, we feel powerfully that we cannot cope with the thing we put into the unknown. That suggested that we generally doubted and therefore feared our ability to cope with the new, the unknown. In a sense our meaning perspective about our ability to cope made the unknown known in that it became something with which we could not cope, something we must fear. Fear of the unknown in reflection emerges as a fear of our own inability to cope with what life can offer, good or bad. Fear of the unknown is fear of our self.
When we find within us our ability to choose how we respond to any situation, we feel confidence in facing the unknown. It's not unknown insofar as we know that we can choose our response to it. We can cope. We can survive. We can even thrive. In that way, we can overcome the limits of this fear producing meaning perspective we have learned over the years: "I cannot face the unknown without fear because I cannot cope with what I do not know. I should live with what I know, live in the past and stay safe."
Knowing that we can choose how we respond to any situation allows us to seek balance in our life rather than control. That liberates. We can enter life far more freely at that point because we feel that we can cope with the new contexts life offers through our power of choice. We can even enjoy choice. Change opens us to life because, as with the sea, life ebbs and flows. Life as life exhibits rhythms and growth, rhythms of shifting possibilities, rhythms of newness, rhythms of joy and sadness. When we enter those rhythms freely, openly, then we don't need to say "No" to fear. "No" is not enough. It serves us better to say "Yes." We can say "Yes" to life in all its variability. We can accept diversity in others and within ourselves. We can choose that freedom anytime. We can find the balance that life allows us in response to its rhythms. As Frankl writes, we can "Say 'Yes' to life in spite of everything."