The Mindset You Can Adopt to Face Your Fears

Action is the Antidote to Fear

Photo by Benjamin Wedemeyer on Unsplash

How many times have we heard or read stuff about ‘overcoming fear’ ‘combatting fear’ ‘get over your fears’ ‘conquer your fear’ ’ ‘fear is the enemy of success’ ?

Fear is such a villainized emotion that the mere mention of it can make people feel like something is wrong with them. People deny feeling fear to keep up appearances and play status games. People go into defensive mode when you confront them about their fears.

How do I know this? Because I’ve been guilty of engaging in each one of these behaviors. To be honest, I’m never going to NOT feel fearful as long as I’m an alive, breathing human.

I have an unpopular opinion — be fearful and optimize the hell out of it. Leverage your fear. Use it as fuel to do better.

You may ask how.

Great question. There is a counter-intuitive technique for setting goals called ‘Inversion Thinking’. It is counter-intuitive because instead of focusing on what you want to happen, you focus on what you don’t want to happen.

In other words, think of any problem you want to solve (or goal you want to achieve). Invert the problem. Identify actions that will ensure the problem is persistent. Then avoid doing those things.

Dickie Bush wrote an excellent blog post summarizing the Inversion Technique.

I know what you’re thinking. We’re talking about fears, not setting goals. But take a pause and ask yourself. Why are you setting a goal? Ask yourself why at least 5 times until you arrive at an uncomfortably specific realization.

The underlying motivation for setting goals is either to avoid your worst fears or to maximize gains. For most people, including myself, preventing fear and the pain that results are a much more powerful motivator. Even research says negative is stronger than positive.

Let me share a personal example.

As a young 20-something, I have a fear of running out of money. So I set a goal to build a 6-month emergency fund to ensure I’m covered if a bad, unpredictable event were to happen in my life. Do you see how a simple fear led me to take this action?

With fear, comes feelings of loss and pain. The pain of not being able to afford the things I want. The pain of having to depend on others for assistance. The loss of self-esteem and poor mental health.

Preventing loss or pain becomes a powerful force for defining our goal-setting actions.

So now let’s get tactical. Back to the Inversion technique and how you can use it to face your fears head-on.

Visualize your fear and work backward to list all the actions that will lead to your fear coming true. A form of catastrophic thinking. Imagine all the actions that can contribute to your worst-case scenario. Then avoid these actions by doing the exact opposite.

Example —

My worst fear is running out of money.

Question: How do I ensure I run out of money?

1. Spend more than I earn
2. Accumulate bad debt
3. Don’t save money

Question: How do I avoid these actions?

1. Build a weekly budget to manage my cashflow and cut down on unnecessary spending
2. Don’t spend credit card money unless I save enough to cover the purchase
3. Build an emergency fund to cover 6 months of living expenses

You see, fear is not such a bad thing after all. Reframe your thinking of fear. Instead of suppressing your fears or trying to ‘eliminate’ them, think of fears as a useful indicator of danger and potential pitfalls to avoid.

I’m aware that making decisions out of fear is living in survival mode. It’s not sustainable. So I have a theory you may find helpful.

When you set a new ambitious goal that scares the hell out of you, you start out as a humble beginner. You must deal with a lot of uncertainty, you’ll probably run into roadblocks that derail your progress, and you may have to struggle a lot without much result.

At the beginning of any new journey, fear can be a very powerful force. But once you take consistent action to nail down the basics, your fear is either greatly reduced or dissolves. At this point, the question becomes how do I double down on what's working? How do I 10x my gains? A natural shift in thinking will happen from fear-based to compounding your gains. But until you climb that mountain, embrace your fears and use them as a guide on what NOT to do.

An important caveat to using the Inversion mindset —

Don’t use this for surface-level fears. You need to dig a little deeper to see the deep-rooted fear behind your surface-level fear. Then go in that direction. When I say avoid doing things, I don’t mean avoid your fear. I mean avoid doing the things that will guarantee your fear remains persistent.

For example, let’s say you have a fear of driving. The solution isn’t to avoid driving. Remember whatever you resist will persist. Perhaps the deeper fear is getting into an accident that hurts yourself and others. Ok well what are the actions that will ensure you get into an accident? Things like going over or under the speed limit, not using your indicators when changing lanes, not wearing a seat belt, etc. Now go do the exact opposite of these actions.

Practice, practice, practice. Gradually exposing yourself to your fears is the only way to take away their power over you. You’ll soon realize you suffered more in your imagination than actually doing the thing.

With everything said and done, you can use the Inversion mindset and still end up experiencing your worst fears. After all, there are many variables out of your control. To that I say, focus on what you can control and have a strong bias for action. This will increase your odds of a positive outcome.

Let’s get one thing straight — fear will always be a part of the human experience. It’s not something to get over.

A quote from spiritual leader Osho to sum it up:

“Just a simple principle: remember, anything that makes you afraid, fearful, is a clear indication of what you have to do. You have to do just the opposite.”