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Book Review: The Art of Fear by Kristen Ulmer

Fear can be a powerful thing. It can bring us to our knees, freeze us in our tracks, and paralyze us. It can warn us of danger – either real or imagined. Fear can also motivate us and drive us, then sabotage us right before we’re about to receive what we’ve been striving for. Fear can also be moved past and turned into a positive factor in our lives. This is what Kristen Ulmer discusses in her book, The Art of Fear

It is so important to keep fear from biting us in the back when we’re trying to do great things. For many, the fear of failure keeps them from acting on their dreams, for others, the fear of success can be a powerful demotivator. Ulmer implores us to reshape the way we think of fear – to shift our thinking from fear being a weakness to the idea that fear is, instead a natural emotion, a “curiosity.” If you’ve been struggling with fear, this book can help you to reshape the way you think about its role in your life. 

About The Art of Fear

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper Wave (June 13, 2017)

A revolutionary guide to acknowledging fear and developing the tools we need to build a healthy relationship with this confusing emotionand use it as a positive force in our lives.

We all feel fear. Yet we are often taught to ignore it, overcome it, push past it. But to what benefit?  This is the essential question that guides Kristen Ulmer’s remarkable exploration of our most misunderstood emotion in The Art of Fear.

Once recognized as the best extreme skier in the world (an honor she held for twelve years), Ulmer knows fear well. In this conversation-changing book, she argues that fear is not here to cause us problems—and that in fact, the only true issue we face with fear is our misguided reaction to it (not the fear itself).

Rebuilding our understanding of fear from the ground up, Ulmer starts by exploring why we’ve come to view it as a negative. From here, she unpacks fear and shows it to be just one of 10,000 voices that make up our reality, here to help us come alive alongside joy, love, and gratitude. Introducing a mindfulness tool called “Shift,” Ulmer teaches readers how to experience fear in a simpler, more authentic way, transforming our relationship with this emotion from that of a draining battle into one that’s in line with our true nature.

Influenced by Ulmer’s own complicated relationship with fear and her over 15 years as a mindset facilitator, The Art of Fear will reconstruct the way we react to and experience fear—empowering us to easily and permanently address the underlying cause of our fear-based problems, and setting us on course to live a happier, more expansive future.

Purchase Links

HarperCollins | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Photo by Meaghan M. Golden

About Kristen Ulmer

Kristen Ulmer is a facilitator who draws from her tenure as the best woman extreme skier in the world for twelve years and from thousands of hours facilitating clients on the subject of fear. Her work has been featured on NPR and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today, Outside magazine, and many other publications. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Find out more about Kristen at her website, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

Ronda Bowen

Ronda Bowen is a writer, editor, and independent scholar. She has a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Northern Illinois University and a B.A. in Philosophy, Pre-Graduate Option, Honors in the Major from California State University, Chico. When she is not working on client projects from her editorial consulting business, she is writing a novel. In her free time, she enjoys gourmet cooking, wine, martinis, copious amounts of coffee, reading, watching movies, sewing, crocheting, crafts, hanging out with her husband, and spending time with their teenage son and infant daughter.

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2 Comments

  1. This view of fear is something totally new to me and I find it fascinating! I definitely need to pick up a copy of this book.

    Thanks for being a part of the tour!

  2. It really is. I’m also familiar with The Gift of Fear, which talks about how it’s our internal alarm system that something’s not quite right, so it’s really interesting to get this perspective as well.

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