5 Things You Can Do Now to Scare Yourself Into a Better Life
Halloween shouldn’t be the only day that makes your heart race.
Comfort is a bloodthirsty killer.
The chainsaw-wielding maniac or the escapee from the asylum will not be the reason for your demise.
Your lack of agency will.
As humans, we are hardwired to be risk averse. The fear of losing something packs more emotional wallop than its comparable gain.
Just take a look at the stock market. It experiences a downturn and thousands of people pull their money out, even though a boon always follows a bust (at least, historically).
This one innate quirk has been the ruin of many a poor boy. Just a few all-too-common examples:
- as we dream about starting that business or pursuing our creative aspirations, we stand pat at our safe, uninspired jobs. Until they fire us. Or we die.
- we so badly want to go talk to that beautiful woman sitting alone at the bar, but what if she rejects us?
- we sense a rift with a person that we really care about, but we’re too afraid to have an uncomfortable ten-minute conversation to address it. Instead, we stay quiet and the chasm widens until the distance becomes too great to overcome.
Do any of these examples resonate with you? They certainly do with me.
In my younger days, I was all about playing it safe. I cared more about not looking stupid than I did about doing awesome shit.
As a result, I lived a very uninspired existence.
And I had the career, relationships and mindset to prove it. Hell, even the way I dressed, the content I consumed and the conversations I had were just as mediocre.
Mediocrity is fear dressed in sweatpants.
Your best life exists just outside of your comfort zone. But I don’t need to tell you that. You know that firsthand.
Let’s take a little inventory of your life’s biggest accomplishments. I can pretty much guarantee that an uncomfortable leap into the unknown preceded it.
- That sports glory you still relive all these years later wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t brave enough to suck at it at first.
- That one romance that you use to measure all future romances wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t have the balls to go talk to her.
- That weird kid that you stuck up for in grade school would have gotten his ass kicked if you were too worried about being ostracized.
(By the way, thanks again for looking out for me, kind stranger.)
Playing it safe is a bad habit. And the older, and more set in our ways we get, the harder it can be to break.
Instead of trying to remove it from our operating system, the best way to break a bad habit is to form a positive one to overwrite it.
For example, when I quit smoking thirteen years ago, I became a much more serious runner. I set distance goals for myself: first a 5K, then a 10K and finally, a half-marathon. When the desire to buy a pack of cigarettes would surface (and it would), I would think about what the impact of that decision would have on my running goals.
Soon, I self-identified with being a runner instead of a smoker. And I never looked back.
‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’
– Anaïs Nin
You need to make living outside your comfort zone your new normal. You need to scare yourself daily.
Here are the five actions that you can take right now that will give you frighteningly good results.
1. Go first.
My default setting had always been to sit back and assess a situation before committing to anything. When asked if someone would volunteer to assist in a presentation or give a speech, I would do my best to make myself invisible.
If you needed someone to volunteer to be third or fourth, I was your guy.
I didn’t like being the kind of guy that would rather make himself small and insignificant than take the lead position.
So, I changed the behavior.
When an opportunity to go first presented itself, I forced myself to raise my hand immediately. It had to be immediate or it wouldn’t happen.
The key is to commit before you have time to reason your way out of it.
The biggest shift for me was around the discomfort in meeting new people. In the past, if I were at a social or work event, I would always wait for the other person to introduce themselves.
Not anymore.
Now when I am in a room with strangers, I take the lead in introducing myself. Without hesitation. With that one action, any social anxiety immediately dissipates for both people involved in that interaction.
By going first, you reduce the scary dragon to the size of a lizard. And you send a message to yourself (and to others) that you don’t let fear dictate your actions.
2. Connect more.
As the number of candles on our birthday cake grows larger, our worlds often get smaller. We interact with a very exclusive inner circle of people: our families, friends and work associates. Factor in a post-pandemic reality of a mostly remote and virtual existence, our society has never been so starved for real connection.
To help reinforce my new ‘go first’ mindset, I challenged myself to start a conversation with at least one new person every day. Whether it was at work, on line at the supermarket or walking my dog through the neighborhood, I looked for an opportunity to create a micro-connection with another human being.
Being able to start a conversation with anybody and establish some level or rapport is a superpower, especially these days. For one, it gives you this level of self-assuredness that you can talk to anyone, regardless of age, gender or perceived compatibility.
It also expands your world. You never know where one conversation can lead. A new career path, a lifelong friend, your future wife… all of these transformative events began with a simple conversation.
Most importantly, these micro-connections echo. Kindness has a way of multiplying. Striking up a conversation with a random stranger on the deli line could embolden him to do the same for the lonely widow on the park bench.
And so on.
In a world filled with so many lonely people, you can be the person brave enough to bring us all a little closer together.
3. Do things you suck at.
The older we get, the harder it is for us to try new things. We tend to eat the same food, listen to the same music and gravitate toward the same type of people we did twenty years ago.
As a result, we miss out on the excitement and joy (and, yes, frustration) of trying new things.
This behavior gets reinforced in our careers. As professionals, we are rewarded for being really good at what we do. So we do that thing over and over.
And over.
What’s the fun in that?
Some years back I decided to sign up for Salsa dancing lessons. As the world’s least graceful, most rhythmically challenged person, I was TERRIFIED. The thought of paying someone to publicly shame me seemed almost masochistic.
But, I did it anyway.
And guess what happened?
I sucked!
But, by the sixth and final lesson… I still sucked! Maybe slightly less.
The point of it wasn’t to become a professional Salsa dancer. It was to send a pattern interrupt to my brain and get it to create new patterns of thought. To break that rinse/repeat cycle that my entire life was running in an endless loop.
I also have three of four pretty sweet moves in my arsenal that I bust out at every wedding. Trust me, it’s swoon-inducing.
Win!
4. Embrace vulnerability: Keeping our feelings ‘close to the vest’ and our flaws covered in camouflage are part of our core operating system as adults.
Men, especially.
It’s a strange paradox: hiding our personal struggles is an all-to-human trait yet, by doing so, we come across as less human.
Less relatable.
I’m not suggesting that we share all our life’s challenges with every person we meet (‘I know this is our first date, but I’d like to tell you how scarring it was to always be the last picked in gym class.’). Nobody wants to be around that kind of over-emoting energy.
I am suggesting that we can take a lot of pressure off of ourselves– and others– by sharing some of our shortcomings. After all, we all have them.
If you’ve read any of my stuff, it’s clear that I don’t shy away from discussing the many mistakes I’ve made (and continue to make) during my stint here among the living.
I wasn’t always that way.
For a good portion of my life, I thought that if I let people know about my weaknesses, they might use them against me. While that is possible, the good of living authentically, warts and all, far outweighs the bad.
Yes, being vulnerable can be scary.
Do it anyway.
5. Fire your gatekeeper.
With the amount of restrictions the voice in our heads tries to put on us, it’s a wonder how we even get out of bed.
‘You shouldn’t talk to her. She’s out of your league.’
‘Changing careers at your age is too risky. Better off playing it safe.’
‘That tweed fedora makes you look like a hipster douchebag.’
Okay, it happened to be right on that one.
The barrier to a better life isn’t some external force that’s trying to hold you down. It’s the voice in your own damn head convincing you that you should stay exactly where you are. Nice and safe.
And average.
It’s like that horror movie trope where the killer is calling from inside the house. You need to drop the phone and get the hell out of there.
While you might not be able to completely get rid of the voice, you can mute it.
By taking action.
Interview for the job that you might be under-qualified for. Talk to the girl that might outkick your coverage. If that sounds too daunting, then consider wearing a stupid hat (though, I’d advise against it).
Life is challenging enough as it is. Don’t let your internal gatekeeper be another obstacle standing in the way of your better life.
Courage is not about the absence of fear. It’s about feeling the fear and doing the thing anyway.
Wrestling with my fear and putting myself out there opened up a whole world of opportunity for me. It rewired my entire self-image. No longer did I identify as being the guy that stays inside and plays it safe.
No, I was now the guy that walks through any door and knows that he can handle whatever is on the other side of it.
There is real power in that.
Making the scary decision to put myself out there led to opportunities that would have never materialized had I chosen the safe path. Every aspect of my life — professional, social, romantic — improved drastically by taking that leap into the unknown.
By being more engaged with the world, I increased the surface area where opportunities could appear. More importantly, I was now the type of guy that seized those opportunities and ran with them.
Decide now to take the actions that scare you. It will change your life.
Join Bill’s newsletter, Reboot Camp Weekly, and get his free eBook that’ll help you live your best life after 40.
