Fear

Popeye Worry Muscles

Popeye is a weakling relative to most of us.

He has to pop a can of spinach to grow his muscles, but we have our worry muscles pumped ready to go.

The best feedback I’ve received this year from anything I’ve written was in response to Winning Like A Loser.

Wake up stressed. Fill your mind with overwhelm. Worry about everything. Go to bed at night feeling like you failed to get it done and looking forward to losing another day…

Plenty of people told me that they were ROFL reading it, before going on to tell me how much it resembled their days…

No Laughing Matter

Writing about the insane way we’ve been conditioned to live I was laughing all the way to the publish, but I was also shining a light on something serious.

Because I’ve spent decades ridding my head of the human condition I can never go back to “not-living” that way, but for plenty of years I did.

Back then I didn’t see a problem with it.

It was “normal” to wake up whining about my job (just talk to many people, even at Goldman Sachs), confused what my life was about, terrified it wouldn’t work out as I dreamed, worried about the utter lunacy of the world.

If you’d asked me I would have told you I was completely justified living that way, “it’s just how it is,” I would have said I was “happy,” but now I’d rather be the walking dead.

As I wrote about here, for most of my life I believed that when I was doing what I want I would feel amazing, but now I know we only feel as amazing as we train ourselves to feel.

Creatures of Habit

You have a standard routine for dressing in the morning. Maybe underwear first—not you, P—then socks, perhaps your pants or skirt before.

No matter your “process,” I know every time it’s the same.

You shower and brush in the same sequence too, because just about everything we do is habit.

And while this serves us in many ways—e.g. you don’t have to figure out whether your socks go on before your shoes—our habits of thinking tend to punish us the other way.

The data is astounding—each day we have somewhere around 60,000 thoughts, of which some 90% are redundant and 80% are negative.

It’s sad, but when you consider the nature of the human predicament, it’s obvious why it’s true.

We’re not built for happiness, but survival. Our brains aren’t set up to wander through predator-infested territory smelling the roses but to fixate on what might eat us.

Biologically we’re built with a negativity bias, and we live in a predatory society that feeds on our fears, which ensures many of us are world-class worriers.

To A Man With A Hammer…

His hands are often beaten.

And to a mind that has been feeding on worry, and developed a Popeye-sized worry muscle, there’s always something more to worry about.

See, the problem with muscles is that once you’ve built them you’ve gotta feed them, and indeed mental muscles do a nice job of feeding themselves.

And this means even if there’s nothing “real” in our life to fear—e.g. unlike our ancestors, no Neanderthals are predating us—the brain will find plenty of fake fear to binge on.

Sadly this means, once you’ve built these muscles, it’s near impossible to be happy, other than pretending to be happily-worried all the time.

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Two Ways To Blow Out That Fear

In last week’s newsletter I opened the door on fear, and this week I want to offer some ways to close it!

There I wrote about how fear holds us all back, and those people who get themselves to take action in the face of their fear.

While we all recognize the power in this, the real question is, how do we get ourselves and others beyond our fear?

The Simple Answer

We all already know how to get beyond our fears…

Simple. Do the thing that we feared, and we no longer fear it.

Once we climb those stairs and jump from the proverbial diving board, we’ll no longer be afraid to jump.

Most fears we diminish or extinguish this simple way.

Think about the timid salesperson from last week. By asking for the order over and over again, they get beyond the fear of asking for the order.

We all know this, which is why the simple answer mostly fails.

Our Fears Keep Us Stuck

Because we know that we can easily squash most fears just by taking action…

Rather than just doing it, we tend to avoid those things that we fear 🙂

Think of it this way.

We typically “try” to get ourselves and others beyond fear by saying stuff like You’ve just gotta do it.

If we can just lead with more conviction. Ask for that date. Or start to build momentum on that project, we know that we’ll move beyond our fear…

Yet, we already knew that!

And unless we’re suddenly more capable in taking that action, we’re more likely to avoid that thing we fear. (e.g. pretending we don’t really want it)

Just Get Motivated!

When the fear is high and we find ourselves or others stuck in taking action, we often reach for more motivation.

That’s like massaging a broken leg hoping to heal it. It doesn’t matter how strong your motivation is when fear is walking the talk.

Perhaps the best example is a fear that, despite our strongest biological motivations, has held every single one of us back.

Like a dog humping a leg we hardly need much motivation to pursue love and sex, yet who amongst us hasn’t been held back by fear?

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What’s the Fear of Iterating?

Of the “meta fears” that hold many of us back, this is one of the most pronounced.

I’ve never heard it termed this way (because I made it up) but you see plenty of evidence of this fear of iterating all around you.

It is buried in the fear of hard work.

The fear of failure.

The fear of getting it wrong.

The fear of looking silly.

The fear of “What will people think?”

The fear of committing to something that truly matters.

The fear of “Am I good enough?”

These and many other fears are merely the fear of iterating in disguise….

OK, So What’s the Fear of Iterating?

It is being afraid to get something wrong in order to keep getting it more right.

It’s the fear of starting with a wrong or incomplete answer, and then continuing to work and re-work your answer until you get to the right one.

Iteration is the process behind every single form of improving, and unless you’re willing to keep iterating something that needs to improve, it never will.

This means, to get anything right we must be cool with continuously improving at getting it “wrong.” To keep moving towards the right answer we must be unafraid to keep landing on wrong ones.

For many people, this fear is game-stopping.

Literally, they’ll never get past it, so game over.

Because they’re scared to admit they aren’t already living the life they truly want, or they aren’t the 100% perfect person they pretend to be, they remain too afraid to improve in any way.

Look around you. You see it everywhere.

As Emerson put it, “All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.”

Yet, just by seeing that of course life is nothing but a continuous iteration to the “end,” we give ourselves an opportunity to iterate to new and better experiences.

How Was Your First Sex?

Imagine that the rest of your life’s sex was as “good” as your first.

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FEAR: Draws The Boundary of Our Lives

Are we really in “control” of our lives? What leads us to make our most important decisions?

Are we motivated towards what we want, or away from what we fear?

The answers are complicated, but it’s generally agreed that fear drives us more than we like to admit.

In the last two weeks I’ve heard two people say more or less the same thing about how fear held them back.

That is—because they were scared, they held themselves back from taking a job.

It was an odd idea to me, but having kicked it around with some people, I now see it more clearly.

Why Was It Odd To Me?

It’s hard for me to understand how fear could prevent someone from taking a better job because I couldn’t imagine fear holding me back from anything that I truly want.

I see fear as part of the package. I’ve jumped from metaphorical planes without a parachute, I’ve suffered plenty of fear, but I still keep leaping.

In doing what you want, you take the actions anyway, and train yourself to deal with the fear.

But that’s not to say I’m immune to fear… I simply face the same lie as the second guy I’ll tell you about.

Not Taking A Job Because of The Fear

One person told me that she didn’t take a job because of her fear.

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How To Deal With Anxiety – And Use It To Your Advantage

Everyone deals with anxiety—to one degree or another.

Some of us squash it down, some of us develop coping strategies, but nonetheless all of us know that gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That sense that things could go wrong.

It’s exhausting. It takes away from the quality of your work, and more importantly, the quality of your life. You wake up on days you should be excited with a sense of dread, and it wears at you.

But anxiety doesn’t need to be your foe. In fact, you can use the same mechanisms that cause anxiety to drive you towards what you want. The brain functions that cause anxiety are incredibly powerful, you just have to know how to use them.

I train my clients not on how to cope with anxiety, but on how to use it to get what they want.

It all starts with understanding where anxiety comes from.

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Elon Musk is an Idiot. You can be too

This week Elon Musk unveiled a new “master plan” for his ambitions with Tesla and SolarCity.

Doing so, he said: “Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.”

Don’t you love that?

Someone who knows how “idiotic” his ambitions are, but who only keeps doubling down.

What enables him to do that? What does it take to keep driving your grandest vision for your life?

Only One Thing…

Well, of course there are many things that can unleash us in life but principally there is one…

A tough one. A real tough one… Stop fear from holding you back.

Look, fear holds us all back. It leads us to question ourselves, to be tentative, to look for the easy way out, and so on, yet it is an emotion we can learn to master.

As I wrote about some time ago in reference to Adam Grant’s fantastic book, Originals.

It’s not that men and women who do remarkable things never suffer from fear, it’s that they are unwilling to let fear dictate their choices.

How do you do this for yourself? Honestly, it’s not easy, and, it can take constant vigilance, yet here are three powerful ways to do it:

Three Steps to Eradicate Fears

If you want to be a Mind Champ at this, I suggest downloading my free e-book to Building Your Limitless Mind.

But, you can also make a lot of progress eradicating fears, simply following these three steps:

1. Ask, what do you possibly have to fear? You do something, it goes wrong, so what? Maybe you lose some money. Maybe you lose some time. But, if the consequences were terribly dire, you wouldn’t be considering it anyways, right?

2. Instead of fearing actions, fear inaction. How would you feel at the end of your life knowing that you played it safe, that there was a dream you failed to pursue, that you left the grandest vision for your life on the table? Fear that feeling!

3. Pull yourself toward the feeling of what it’s like to put fears behind you. How good does it feel to crush a fear? Say, if you were terrified to jump from a high diving board, how do you feel once you’ve done it? Don’t you want more of this feeling?

Candidly, from my research and personal experience, these types of questions are not to be asked once, but constantly, daily, in a life of expanding what is possible for you.

P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.

P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.

Be Crippled with FEAR

Most of my life I’ve been crippled with fear.

Fortunately it has mostly been the fear of failing to live the most amazing life I can imagine, and it has only crippled me in doing things I don’t want to do.

Use Your Fear

In our society fear is often seen negatively, when in fact it is our savior.

Like insecurity which keeps us secure, and pain that tells us something is wrong, fear is a signal that gets our attention.

Fear is neither good nor bad, but merely a matter of how you respond to it.

In one of the two TV shows I watch, The Men Who Built America, Carly Fiorina says—

“The difference between people who succeed and people who fail, I think, in many cases, it’s not fear, everyone experiences fear. The difference is, what do you do with your fear? Do you work to overcome it or do you let it defeat you? I think that is actually what distinguishes very successful people from others.”

Then Break It

All of us know that in the face of fear our nervous system triggers a fight-or-flight mechanism.

But what many don’t recognize is that before we fight or flight, we freeze.

Like a deer in the headlamps, it is this freeze mechanism that gets most people shot. In the face of fear, they neither move towards or away. Unsure of what to do they do nothing, which is the meaning of being crippled by fear.

Instead, take on the things you fear. Engage your fear. Sense it. Smell it. Taste it. Roll around in it. Play with it.

And then break its friggin’ back!

P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.

P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.

Quickly Squash Your Fears

“What would you say if I told you I could change this for you right now?”

“What do you mean,” he asked, “On the lift, we only have a few minutes.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I would say you are crazy,” he nervously chuckled.

Crazy Is How Easily We Can Overcome Fears

I agreed and then I asked him, “How good would it be if we got to the top and this debilitating fear of public speaking you had was gone?”

“What would you say to that?”

“I would say you perform miracles, because this fear has held me back my entire career,” he said.

So I asked him, “What is possible for you when this fear is gone?”

“Well, anything is possible for me when I’m leading more confidently,” he uttered.

“And, how do you imagine yourself being different?” I queried.

He beamed and said, “I would be able to lead my teams in ways I haven’t before, and my career would be on a new trajectory.”

“Great,” I said, “And how does this feel?”

“It feels wonderful,” he said, “And I feel so confident.”

“And how does this make you feel,” I asked.

And while he described how good it feels feeling confident, I said:

“Now, quickly, with this feeling imagine yourself standing in front of your team where you used to have that problem, and notice how it now feels different.”

He looked at me and said, “It feels wonderful and I am confident.”

Shocked, he asked me, “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do it, you did it…

…and now you know how, practice this every day until you feel yourself speaking confidently,” I shouted as I skied away.

P.S. You can read here more mindset articles.

P.P.S. And you can read here more specific articles on destroying fear.