Beyond the major moments of fear in our lives, there are many other times we sacrifice our personal truth to go along, be approved of, or just plain be "nice." Because despite all our advances, there's still a huge premium on women being "accommodating" and "team players" who don't "rock the boat." As Marlo Thomas once said, "A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold." Or, as a friend of mine operating in the treacherous political world of Washington's Beltway told me, "It's good to be a team player, but you also have to know the difference between all of us standing together and all of us jumping off the same cliff." If you let them, the hungry little gremlins of compromise will devour your soul bit by bit and come to dominate your life. They feed the fear of being left out, the fear that survival will be impossible outside the tribe. No wonder fear shoots through our veins, constricting our blood flow and shutting down our creative energy - we are in survival mode.

When we are in the grip of survival thinking, the dominant illusion is that once we vanquish the enemy facing us, overcome the obstacle in front of us, get over the next hill, life will be secure, free of problems, perfect. Then we will be fearless. Then we can start the life we've been planning on. But that long-awaited day never comes because there is always another enemy, another obstacle, another hill.

To live in fear is the worst form of insult to our true selves. By having such a low regard for who we are - for our instincts and abilities and worth - we build a cage around ourselves. To prevent others from shutting us down, we do it for them. Trapped by our own fears, we then pretend that we're incapable of having what we want, forever waiting for others to give us permission to start living. Pretty soon, we start to believe this is the only way.

The most common response to this crisis of self is conformity: "The individual," Erich Fromm writes in Escape from Freedom, "ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be. . . . This mechanism can be compared with the protective coloring some animals assume."

So, ironically, the woman who appears well adapted may be the one who has simply become most comfortable being governed by her fears, while the "neurotic" one is still gamely struggling to reach fearlessness.

Copyright © 2006 by Arianna Huffington

Excerpted from On Becoming Fearless: ...in Love, Work, and Life by Arianna Huffington, (Little, Brown; Hardcover; September 2006)

About the Author : Arianna Huffington --- bestselling author, Internet entrepreneur, journalist, mother and one of the most influential people in America --- believes that conquering fear is crucial to living a full life and to making a difference in the world, and in this powerful and daring manifesto, she inspires us to take on the task.