Facing Your Fears with Fear Setting: A Guide to Making Difficult Choices

Understanding your fear helps you make difficult choices, which can lead to happiness and peace.

Tim Ferris gave a fantastic TED talk about “Why you should define your fears instead of your goals”. You can watch it here.

As he puts it: “The hard choices — what we most fear doing, asking, saying — are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail in a simple but powerful exercise he calls “fear-setting.” Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.”

Fear setting is a tool everyone should know how to use. Even if it does not become a habit, it is not one for me; it is an exercise I suggest you try. You can also use fear setting to make tough decisions.

Here is the way I approach it

I use the following process:

1. Name your fear.
2. Define the worst-case scenario.
3. What can you do to prevent the worst-case scenario from happening?
4. How could you repair…