The first duty of man is to conquer fear he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

Fear does not usually stop you by force; it stops you by making delay feel like wisdom. While it holds the wheel, every option gets evaluated for danger rather than for worth, and the result is a life shaped by what you avoided. Getting free of it rarely means feeling no fear at all. It means the fear stops being the thing that decides.

A useful move is to separate the two questions you are probably answering as one: what do I actually want here, and what am I afraid of. Written side by side, they are often unrelated. Then you can choose with the fear present rather than in charge.