“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do”
Eleanor Roosevelt
This is part 3 of a 3 part series about creating the mindset for achievement (please also check out “The Power of Questions” and “Why You Should be Your Best Friend”). These ideas are at the foundation of really achieving goals and improving your life.
This is something of a personal issue for me as I used to be completely under the spell of fear. I was stuck at home unable to leave the house and scared to go to work. That was 5 years ago and I have learned a lot about the power of fear and how to live with it since then.
We all know about fear and how it can make us feel, how it can sometimes paralyze us. If you get deep into NLP there is some stuff that claims to remove fear, but I haven’t found anything that works yet for me, so I’m not going to write about it.
Instead I want to chat with you about something that can work for everyone. This is about learning to feel the fear and just doing it anyway. When you first learn to use this powerful idea you will quickly find yourself able to use it in more and situations for great results. Just imagine feeling scared yet having the personal power to march right through it. It feels great doesn’t it.
Anyway, so let’s get moving, here are the basic steps to this:
- You have to disassociate yourself from the fear. So often we say “I’m scared” … “I’m paralyzed with fear”. However, understand that YOU are not the fear. Whenever you feel scared, just change that thought to “I have a thought that -I am scared-”. This automatically removes you from the fear and can allow you to react more rationally. This is a great sentence structure to use, simply saying “I have a thought that ______”, can help you rapidly dissolve any gut feeling.
- I just take a deep breath and before its over, walk in and do it anyway. The key idea here is that ts important not to let the fear escalate, so don’t think about it, just do it.Thats the simple way, the fastest way, I read about that one and it works … sometimes … but not all the time.
- So I added one more step for myself. This is the idea of testing all your natural reactions. Sometimes for example you might think “that guy will never talk to me”. Thats basically your thought, so you tell yourself “I recognize my thought that I’m scared, but I’m going to see if its true or not just for fun”. Finished. Simply, tell yourself to test to see if your fear or reaction was correct. 99% of the time it is incorrect. So just turn fear into a little game.
The thing about fear is that you feel it when you go into the unknown. It means you are learning and discovering and pushing your boundaries. When you feel fear you should love yourself and smile because it means you are making progress. You are developing and moving towards your goals.
Doesn’t fear just make you smile. Feel fear and LOVE it.
The Task:
When you feel the fear. Straightaway turn it into “I have a thought that _____”. Next test if that thought is true or not. Make this a habit and you will soon love when you feel fear because it means you are learning something new.
