A tip for coping with fear on a motorcycle:

There are two kinds of cornering that might induce fear: the tight corners for maneuvering your bike (circles, U-turns) at slow speed, and the high-speed corners you find on the road.

Corners on the road

When corners stress you, the recipe, in fact, is really simple: enter them at lower speed!
Your brain is very busy when you enter a corner:  determining the entering speed and the right gear, planning the line through the corner, checking the surface of the road (long before you will be there), evaluating the traffic situation (also long before you will be there), trying to remember to look ahead as much as possible, etc.

The faster you ride, the faster your brain has to compute all those things. Your brain will ring the alarm when it has to work too fast, and what you feel at such a moment is fear.

Remedy

What helps is simply ride slower towards the corner, and what helps is practicing more often (your brain will be able to do the computing more by routine and will be able to do its job in a shorter time).  What also helps is to think about how you ride corners and read about it (again, because your brain will more easily know what the plan for a certain corner will be).  In short: gain experience, give yourself time, think about riding and read about it.

Body language

While cornering, you might watch your body language: when you keep your body relaxed, you will feel relaxed yourself. You can try the following:

·         Watch your hands: don't let them tighten on the handlebars; hold them loosely.

·         Watch your breath: let it be steady and deep.

·         Watch how you look: don't fixate on one point; let your eyes "glide" through the corner, far beyond where you are, and try to have a broad view at the same time.

Concentrate

Often, when you find yourself afraid of corners, you concentrate on speed, or on how much you lean: "See, I went much too slow through that corner", or "See, I could lean much more, my knee didn't touch the ground, I'm a sissy".  When you try, instead, to concentrate on the line you are planning to take, on the point where you want to lean in, on being steady on the throttle, on being prepared for the corner long before, you will probably no longer be afraid.  Your speed will probably be higher (you won't notice because it doesn't feel that way, but objectively, it will be the case), and your chickenline shrinks and shrinks.

Another kind of corner is the tight corner that you make at slow speed while maneuvering: sometimes, you become afraid of leaning your motorcycle at slow speed.

Tight corners

One of the problems with tight corners can be that your brain refuses to understand that you can really lean at slow speed (my brain is among those brains).

Another problem could be that you know that you will not be able to keep your motorcycle from falling if you have to come to a standstill during the maneuver, and you constantly think about maintaining the possibility of stopping.

Leaning

When leaning during a figure eight or a U-turn doesn't feel comfortable, you might try doing the maneuver standing on the pegs instead of sitting on the saddle. It might seem strange, but it will be much easier that way.  The point is that you yourself will keep an upright position (with your hands at the handlebars, of course) while pushing the motorcycle away from you. Because you keep an upright position, pushing the motorcycle away will come more naturally.  You also can feel what to do with your shoulders and hips, when you stand while riding a circle.

Falling by stopping

When you once have experienced stalling your bike while taking a U-turn, it's hard to get rid of the thought that you should be able to stop during the whole turn. That makes it very hard to lean.

In the same way, don't practice in an area with curbstones in your way: find a place where you have space, lots of space, start with big circles and gradually tighten them.  And again: don't concentrate on how much you lean but on where you look (always further than you do), on how you use your shoulders, your hips, and how steady you can keep the speed.