This is a wonderful post, @steve1122! I absolutely agree with you that we embrace our fears and deal with them rather than run away. However, it depends on the kind of challenge. Honestly, there are some challenges that are not worth spending my energy on. Firstly, I assess what kind of challenge it is to ascertain whether or not it is worth my time and attention. Secondly, it has to be a challenge arising from my values, otherwise I will not pay attention to it. Regarding facing challenges head on, I'll give a concrete example. I was less that a month old in steemit and saw a post titled - Make Carlifornia great again? by @matrixdweller . It immediately reminded me of the slogan ''make America great again'' . I laughed in my response and guess what? He flagged down my post. Now at that time, Matrixdweller had a higher reputation than I, so his flagging down my post maliciously, affected my reputation on steemit negatively, something I still have not recovered from till today. Here, my first response that earned me his downvote,
He responded angrily and this was my reply to his response,

When I noticed that he downvoted me, I had to think fast what to do to prevent it from happening again, so I went to the 'mute' button right after ''follow' button, and mutted him, so that he doesn't ever again get to see my posts. That was my way of guarding against threat to my reputation, which I value so much. Upvoted and resteemed your post. Well done! STEEM ON!!!