If fear stops you from achieving your best, read this
“What’s the smallest, tiniest thing that I can master and what’s the scariest thing I can do in front of the smallest number of people that can teach me how to dance with the fear?” — Seth Godin
Mental toughness can be developed through practice like any other skill. Start small and then grow
Fear, this feeling that for the most part, chooses for us what we can or cannot do, what we should or should not do. This state of mind which finds us excuses not to do what we most need to do, which finds us incapacities, and redirects us to tasks that present no challenge nor any source of personal development.
As Steve Jobs said: Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Fear is something to conquer
Fear is definitely something to conquer, something to dominate. Fear is supposed to be a feeling that covers us with rationality in the face of danger. However, by looking around me and you certainly have the same perception, I see that fear has become the basic feeling that guides us and unfortunately severely limits us.
The fear of losing our partner prevents us from addressing substantive issues in our relationship. We are afraid of not being able to resolve the conflicts potentially related to this difference of opinion.
The fear of resigning from your current job, being afraid that you will not find a better job elsewhere. You prefer to continue to destroy yourself from within and undermine your own moral and that of your colleagues rather than addressing the problem with courage and determination.
The fear of failure literally inhibits you from taking any kind of risk. You are afraid that society sees your failures and judges you. Therefore, you choose not to take any risk and opt to settle to whatever society has planned for you. You choose to stay in your comfort zone hoping that by miracle your life changes.
As Jerzy Gregorek says “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life”
What mechanisms can you then put in place to counteract this fear, which, although legitimate in some respects, can turn into a real rat trap when it is totally out of our control.
Dominate your fear with this four-step process
Successful author Tim Ferris explains one of the methods he has found to control his fears and put them into perspective, in real life.
Tim suggests that we build a 3-column table in which we mention from the first column to the last, our fears, ways to reduce the occurrence of the worst-case scenario that would happen if our fears materialized, and finally the plan of a management crisis in case the worst-case scenario really materialized.
Based on my life experience and what I have been learning from my mentors, beating your fears usually requires you to go through the following steps.
1. Face your fears
First, you have to believe that there is no such thing as failure, it is just feedback. Fear has to be treated as a sign to pay attention to the risk related to what you are doing, rather than a sign to stop trying. Sit and write down your fears, and then face them one by one. This practice will help you desensitize to the concept and reality of fear. Once your mind expands it can’t go back.
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the surer we can be that we have to do it.
Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.” — Steven Pressfield, Author of the World of Art
In the beginning, it is more important to start than it is to succeed. It is only through starting that we reveal the opportunity for growth.
2. Bin the idea of failure
The most common reason for fear is the possibility of failure. When the primitive man was trying to light his first fire, do you think he was counting the number of attempts before getting warm or did he think after the 100th attempt, “I’m 100 steps closer to being warm”? Failure and success are two different ways of looking at the same thing. There is no such thing as failure, just information on how to improve.
“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” — Denis Waitley
3. Picture and accept the worst possible outcome
The most important thing that you must do is reconcile and accept the worst possible outcome. Be sure that you can cope with that. If you can’t, then you shouldn’t proceed. Once this is done, it will allow you to perform free and without worry.
You will never perform to your best if there is a constant battle in your mind, while you’re performing. You shouldn’t be thinking about getting hurt, feeling ashamed while trying to accomplish things. You should be thinking about and visualizing, the positive outcome at all times.
As an example, suppose you are a skier with a fairly honorable level and want to take your level to a new height. This new challenge requires you to take more risk and start practicing on the tracks reserved to professionals. The worst that could happen to you is the death during a ski session.
You could die from a landslide, or following a loss of control due to a level of difficulty far beyond your abilities. The main difficulty in successfully interacting with your fear is to be in agreement with the worst possible scenario. In our example, it means being aware of the risk of death inherent to your activity and be mentally prepared for it.
From this moment, referring to the 3-column table mentioned above, you can, as Tim Ferris suggests, set up actions to mitigate risks on one hand and find ways to narrow down the impact your death would have on your nearest environment (your family for example).
To reduce your risk of dying while skiing, you could:
1) Take private lessons with a professional, who will monitor your progress and offer you challenges with a growing level of difficulty adapted to your pace of progression.
2) Practice skiing with a professional by your side when you start practicing on tracks at the level of difficulty you deem “very dangerous” for you. The latter will then be able to assist you or warn the helpers in case a misfortune happens during a practice track.
Furthermore, if you die, in order to reduce the risks for your family members, you could:
a) require insurance coverage for them, tailored to the high risk associated with your hobbies.
b) Choose to engage in such an activity only when you have put enough money aside for your loved ones.
However, very often the most difficult part of our relationship with fear is to be able to truly identify what is the source of this fear. Once identified, we often realize that the “worst case scenario” has a limited impact, far from being as destructive as we thought at first.
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality” — Seneca
4. Just go and do it: Growth always happens out of our comfort zone
After you are done with step 3, Get out of your comfort zone and just go for reaching your goal. There are chances that you fail but try to assess yourself incrementally and don’t go on whimsical challenges that don’t have anything to do with your current skills. Don’t try to go fight the MMA’s worldwide champion if you are just taking your first classes. You need to have the prerequisites, the basics (some thousands of hours of training) to convert into results. Read my story on flow to have a better understanding of this point.
“When you are thinking about doing something and it feels scary, when it feels like this big lion is waiting at the finish line and he’s roaring and he’s ferocious and he’s going to tear you apart… you should just run toward that lion anyway. Run to the roar.” Tina Essmaker
TAKEAWAYS
It is totally normal to be afraid of certain challenges, it is a human feeling. The goal is to be able to control this fear and not let this becomes something that inhibits you, but which in the opposite motivates and pushes you to an upper level of practice.
I took some extreme examples in my text above, but remember that almost everytime you can cope with the worst case scenario inherent in the activity you intend to do.
The comedian Ari Shaffir has finally been able to handle his stage fright after he took some steps back and ask to himself what the worst thing that could happen to him if he performed poorly on stage and his answer was: “I will still be alive, even if I might feel bad. Anyhow, I can get on with it”.
Hence, during one show, in order to put himself in front of what he dreaded the most, the public’s disapproval, he decided to go on stage to do a “silent performance”. Not a single word during a whole 3-minute show.
The goal was to test himself and see if he could handle with the aftermath related to what he painted as his worst case scenario. His response was “yes I can handle that”.
In a nutshell, you can handle the worst case scenario, don’t let the fear freezes you and start performing to achieve your big goals.
If you enjoyed the reading, do not hesitate to leave some claps and leave a comment. Thank you
