Has there ever been something you wanted to do, a job you wanted to apply for, a person you wanted to ask out on a date, but some nagging voice inside your head talked you out of it?

That voice is called fear, and while there are many self-help books claiming you need to eradicate fear in order to move forward, one North Carolina author is saying, instead, to use that fear.

Boston born Lee Anne McClymont has just recently written a book called “The Friendly Fear Notebook” because “contrary to a lot of people, you can’t get rid of fear, it’s a great gift,” she said. We have to make fear work for us. All of the energies and alertness that fear brings with it ... it’s a great navigator, but a terrible driver.”

She’s bringing her book and a two-weekend workshop to the Hamlet Library Nov. 7 and 14 to help residents of Richmond County come to terms with their fears and put them to good use.

McClymont is no stranger to fear. At 39, after working for 17 years as a medical administrator at Cornell University, the married mother of a young daughter, was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

She left work to undergo treatments, and while no one expected her to survive, as soon as her body was in remission, McClymont went back to work.

After realizing her job as an administrator was no longer fulfilling and in sync with the person she’d become because of her illness, McClymont also realized living in Manhattan was no longer a good fit either.

“So I asked my husband if he thought we should try something new and he said ‘Let’s do it,’” she said.

And in 2004, having visited the area before, McClymont and her husband Bill, who owns his own business, made the trip to North Carolina, to the Chapel Hill area.

The family moved to an apartment in North Raleigh, but quickly discovered that wasn’t the place for them either, because it had the same traffic and same congestion issues as Manhattan.

“We ended up in a nine-acre Carolina farmhouse in Hillsborough,” McClymont said. “I’d never had to take care of a huge house and yard before, it was frightening. But it disconnected me from my former professional life to the new me, and I started writing a lot.”

The topic of fear however, wasn’t broached until a family trip to Cape Cod.

“People were amazed we’d had the courage to leave the city,” she said. “And I realized it had a lot to do with understanding you have a fear but that the opportunities are bigger than the fear.”

And that’s how the idea for the book was born.

But it’s not your typical self-help book, McClymont has written this as a workbook so that the reader can play an active roll in figuring out their own fears and how to work with them.

“It asks the reader to start a conversation with themselves first,” McClymont explains. “What are your experiences with fear? What language do you use to talk about fear? You’re creating a sort of scrapbook of your fears. It’s just between you and the pen. This workbook tries to untangle emotions nestled in that fear experience with actual facts.”

From there McClymont said she asks readers to do about a dozen other exercises to help them recognize the things their fear is holding them back from.

The workshop McClymont is bringing to Hamlet is called “Harness Fear, Harvest Hope.” The workshop is free and open to the public, but requires registration because there’s only room for about 20 people.

“This is not a sit down and listen thing,” McClymont said. “It requires a commitment to work on the exercises and confront the fear obstacle. The most important dialogue we ever have is with ourselves. To know, to assess, so we can go forward.”

One of the main things McClymont focuses on is how fear affects change.

“All fear does is stop change,” McClymont said. “It’s a primer for growth.”

One obvious way fear stops change is when people lose weight and then gain it all back, McClymont said.

“A lot of that is because people are afraid of change. No change is long lasting if you let fear get in the way,” McClymont said. “That gives fear a tremendous amount of influence over the quality of our lives and decision making.”

McClymont said she’s read a lot of self help books and the difference between hers and others is that once you finish reading it, hopefully you’ve achieved something and reached a breaking point that will allow you to move forward.”

McClymont picked Hamlet for her workshop because she’d read about it several times in recent months, first about the town’s National Guard Unit and then the closing of the Rexam plant.

“I knew there was a huge opportunity here to tell people they can’t lose hope,” she said.

McClymont’s book is scheduled to be published in the late spring, and there may be one final opportunity before it’s published to add more stories to the book.

“There’s always stories that need to be told,” she said. “I’m transforming a life, I’m a catalyst. I’m not a coach, but the work I’ve done is a beacon and these are all the things you can do because you started with an honest dialogue.”

McClymont’s life as an author is incredibly different from the life she led as a medical administrator, but, she said, “Like everything, if you don’t grow, why are you alive? There are better choices out there, not that people bring to you, but choices you see and figure out how to get that and why you want that. It’s not necessarily a material answer. I want people to think ‘If I’m not doing this, what’s stopping me? And bring forth their best.”

McClymont said if at the end of all of this there’s one person who’s life is a little better because of the workshop, she’ll have done her job.

To register for the workshop, call (800)899-4882 or e-mail register@friendlyfearnotebook.com.

n Staff writer Eren Tataragasi can be reached at (910)997-3111 ext. 19 or at etataragasi@yourdailyjournal.com