How Fear Controls Us

Boo ha! Did I frighten you? I hope I did. There’s all kinds of things to be afraid of. All the time, we’re afraid of horrible things, you know, like the mean neighbor down the street, the people who don’t speak your language, the boss who is sometimes persnickety about your work, or all kinds of things like maybe socks that aren’t quite right for your pants. Damn, we live small, unimportant, unfulfilled lives because fear holds us back all too often. I sometimes see it as a tragedy that so many people, middle age, older people, living boring unfulfilled lives because they are afraid. They’re afraid of the fear, they’re afraid of getting out of their comfort zones. And yet, fear is a good, normal, and natural emotion. We evolved as a species to have fear. It helped us a ton. Our ancestors survived because we were afraid of saber-toothed tigers and of getting too close to the cliff. And today, if you’re getting too close to the cliff because you’re taking an Instagram photo, jump off. I don’t care. But most of us, most of the time, don’t have real things to be afraid of. I would challenge you in this video to consider, are we so comfortable, so demanding of our comfort, pleasures, and ease of life that we live a little life as a result? Well, stay tuned, and let’s find out.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Is fear holding you back? If you’re anything like me, I’m sure it does at times. We have all kinds of insecurities. You know, we don’t want to go to the networking meeting because, oh, that’s hard work, and I don’t want to meet new people, and some people won’t be friendly, and some people will be boring, so I don’t go. And if I don’t network, I can’t start that new business that I’m interested in. If I can’t start that new business that I’m interested in, I have to stay in this little job that I really hate, and I’ve had you hate it for the last 10 years. Are you hearing me? Or do you say, oh my goodness, I have nothing to wear because I’m going to want to go out to the show, and you know the black dress is a little worn, and I wore the red the last time I was there, and blah blah blah, these little tiny things that nobody else gives a shit about you. That’s the truth. They don’t care. You care too much.

Think of the society we live in right now, you know, the viewers of this video, living in the enormous comforts of a North American lifestyle. You know, you’re afraid of the cold water so you let it run in your shower for a whole bunch of minutes because it gets warm enough. And I’m guilty of this. We don’t like the temperature in the house, we can go and turn it up one degree. Or, oh, I’m going out and I better take a jacket just in case it gets too cold. Or, the drive might be too far, so I think I’ll stay home and have the delivery people bring my groceries. All these immediate, simple comforts that we have in our lives have created a habit of expecting comfort and ease. And the comfortable and easy life is pleasant enough, but it is small. People who have lived an easy, comfortable life, they have nothing to teach me. The people who have lived hard, demanding lives and challenge themselves, I want to pay attention to what those people have done. And mostly, they will say they’ve had a happy, opportunistic life. Just go back a couple weeks ago when I did a video about psychological richness which, you may know, is not about happy emotions, big smiles on our face. It’s just saying, I’ve got a juicy, wonderful thing going on in my life because I take on shit that matters, that challenges me. And when we do that, it’s fun, it’s stimulating, it’s provocative. It causes us to change our perspective on way more in life than just that thing that we might have been afraid of. And because we challenged that fear, we grew, and we had more to offer to ourselves. We were wiser, we had more to contribute to the people around us.

That’s the challenge for us is to get out of our demand for being comfortable all the time and instead be willing to be afraid and not afraid of the fear, right? Because that’s what we’re usually dealing with. Most of us, in the present moment, we haven’t got stuff to be afraid of. We’re worrying about the things that went badly in the past, we’re imagining those or even worse things in the future. And so, this fear of fear, oh, I don’t want to be afraid so I’m not going to go to the networking meeting. I don’t want to have to speak to somebody who’s got a foreign language and won’t understand me, so I’m not going to go to Mexico or Spain or Ireland or some other place where they don’t speak my kind of English, right? We’re afraid of fear. That’s the comfort culture paralysis that so often gets all of us, me included. So what do we do? How do we get out of this? Well, the first thing, and I know I prescribe it all the time for everything, is to become aware, is to be mindful, to see our fear. And the fear of fear is very subtle.

When I say, oh, I’m afraid of being in a foreign country and not knowing how to speak their language, I can imagine that and say that’s a real fear. But the thing that’s holding me back is the fear of that fear. I’m not actually experiencing that in the moment. I’m just imagining it, and so I’m afraid of fear, and I don’t even want to go there, and I don’t imagine the bigger, more interesting, psychologically rich life. That’s a subtle thing, the fear of fear. And when we practice mindfulness, and we stay attuned to what’s really going on in our lives, then we can actually feel it and say, oh yeah, I’m not at the networking meeting, but I know it makes me uncomfortable when I’m there sometimes, and I speak to somebody I’m intimidated by or boring or whatever. And if I can see that subtlety, that oh, I’m afraid of fear, I’m afraid of discomfort, then I can actually start looking at it from a realistic perspective, instead of acting from that place of fear without really considering it.

So, mindfulness first. And you know, whatever your mindfulness path is, go for it. Gold standard for great mindfulness is probably meditation, but yoga and all kinds of other things could get you into mindful moments. And when we see our fear, then the first thing we want to do is breathe through it because almost always, if we take a calm series of gentle, slow breaths, the fear itself, the thing that’s driving that fight or flight response, subsides. Then, I can consider the thing I’m afraid of from a rational perspective and say, “Does the fear I have outweigh the advantages, the benefits I’d like to get from doing those things that fear is holding me back from?” And I ask you right now, what’s holding you back? Are there things you want from your life that you’re not getting? If that’s the case, and for all of us to some degree, it must be true, consider for a moment. Is it fear or fear of fear? Fear of losing the comfortable life, the easy comfortable life that you might have, is the fear of those things that’s holding you back? And if so, there’s strategies we can employ.

One of them is simply being really clear about the vision of what it is I want. If I imagine over and over again, day after day, in detail including the emotions that I’ll feel if I get what I want, then usually, at a subconscious level, the brain starts solving that problem and figuring out how to get what you want. So that’s a cool thing. And then secondly, I would suggest, usually, the things we really want, they’re big. “Oh, I want a successful business with multiple employees and I want to be making hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue every month”, and whatever, but I’m fearful of networking.

So, we need to break our big goals down into that big vision of the big business into really incremental steps. “I would like to have a website. Oh, I’d like to have a business card. I’d like to go to one networking meeting with people who are into what I want to sell or produce or serve the world with.” Break it down into little teeny pieces, because it’s way less scary to say, “I only have to go to one meeting with maybe the executive director of the chamber of commerce.” Not so bad, I can do that. I can go for coffee with that one person. You can do it. Consider that old adage that, “How do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time.” Be aware of our fears. Be aware of the subtlety of the fear of fear, of being out of our comfort zones, and then act. Do something, something tiny, but something steady. And if you can make daily habits of that, your life won’t be unfulfilled, boring, and stagnant.

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