What happens when you face your worst fear? Missy Meinhardt, 51, of Cincinnati, lost her 18-month-old daughter, Sophie, to a brain tumor in 2006. As any parent will tell you, losing a child is always the biggest fear.

“In many ways, I am fearless now,” she says. She still has the typical worries about her other kids, “but in so many ways, I’m a changed woman. I don’t care what people think about me the way I used to. I have a sense of freedom I didn’t have before.”

As an educator who teaches at-risk kids, Ms. Meinhardt used to stress so much about evaluations and trying to get everything perfect in the classroom. “I’m just not afraid to fail anymore,” she says. “If a schedule or a resource doesn’t work, I’ll try something else and keep advocating for these kids. And if for some reason I get reprimanded for speaking out, well, I am not afraid to find another job.”

For her, tragedy was the cue to let go of certain fears. But are there easier ways to find that liberation?

Jeannette Walls, author of the memoir “The Glass Castle,” knows a thing or two about facing down fears. She had been working as a high-profile journalist for New York magazine, hiding the fact that she grew up extremely poor, when one day she encountered her homeless mother on the street — an experience that filled her with shame, and which she subsequently used as the opening scene of her book.

“It felt like I was surviving in a world that wasn’t mine, and I was going to get ‘found out,’ and exposed and people would literally throw things at me, the way they did when I was a kid,” she says. “But it got to the point where I was tired of hiding. The story needed to be told, and I needed to be the one to tell it.”

It turns out that no one actually threw eggs at her. In fact, facing her fears and telling her story changed her life for the better. “I’m so much happier now,” Ms. Walls says.