Hello there
My friend, Jonathan Doyle with you once again, so stoked to have
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Do that for me today, where you going to talk about something from the famous
personal development, giant Dale Carnegie, we're going to talk some more about fear.
You can conquer almost any fear if you only make up your mind to do so for
remember fear doesn't exist anywhere.
Except in the mind.
All right. This is a favorite topic for me.
Radio listeners know I'm big on fear.
Why?
Because fear as I teach on stage is the death force.
If you look at almost everything terrible in the world, there'll be a fear-based.
Whether it's war, whether it's corruption, whether it's greed or violent, whatever
it is, there'll be a fear-based component.
There'll be a sense of, um, wanting to create fear or acting out of fear.
So I'm big on fear because not only does it cause global problems, I think
it really causes personal problems in terms of relationships, for sure, but
also in terms of what we achieve in life.
So what Dale Carnegie is saying to you today is.
Your mind has a huge impact in your experience of what you call fear.
And as I was thinking about this episode, I thought, think about it.
Because people say to me, you know, Jonathan is saying,
there's no such thing as fear.
We can just be fearless.
We can have no fear in our lives.
If we just think about it differently, what do you do if
a huge snake comes towards you?
What are you going to do?
Go, I'm cool with that.
It's just, it's just a snake.
Hello, snake.
How are you?
I choose not to fear.
That would be stupid.
And probably get you killed, especially here in Australia, because pretty much
in Australia and you have to walk out your front door and something late.
You now.
When a snake comes towards you, the limbic system in your brain, which is our enemy
alien and a Malian brain, which is right in the back of our Scarlet's quite small.
It's, it's been there for, you know, hundreds of millions of years.
It's the fight or flight thing connects to the hypothalamus,
regulates, you know, arousal now.
When that limbic system encounters the concept of a snake,
it's going to lose its mind.
The limbic system is going to go, ah, because it has adapted through
evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to keep you alive.
So it will give you the experience of fear for a very good.
And it will be instantaneous and it will be before thought there'll
be a millisecond where your brain recognizes the snake and the limbic
system just goes, boom, boom.
So is real.
And there are some things we should fear snakes, sharks, really bad, French cinema.
I don't know.
There'll be something that you just is just objectively scary
and just don't go near it.
So, but what Carnegie's telling us today is that's a pretty
small category of things.
You are not going to be confronted by a snake.
Most days, you're not going to be confronted by earthquakes or fires or
saber tooth tigers, most days of the week.
I don't know where you live, but if that's happening just Google
real estate agent and move, right.
What can I get is telling us is what we tend to do is use our prefrontal
cortex, the part of our brain up here, the executive function of our brain.
To create fear by ascribing, meaning to things that we feel
unsure about job interview.
Right.
Uh, snake might kill you a job interview.
Won't.
Now you could theoretically have a heart attack in a job interview
if you were so nervous, it's possible, but it's relatively rare.
You don't tend to see, you know, front page news, headlines,
doctors report massive uptake in job interview, sudden death.
Haven't seen that story.
But do we get nervous because we do not all of us, but many of us would
first dates asking someone out, asking for a raise, dealing with difficult
people, conflict, fear, but those things aren't going to kill us.
So it's not really our limbic system.
It's doing it.
Our limbic system is going to come into play and we'll get the
experience of arousal and fear.
But Kony is telling us that it's really about the meaning.
So, what we have to do is become masters of meaning, masters of meaning.
So that if we fail at something, it's about the meaning.
If we're afraid of something it's gone, we have to be able to go, what
meaning am I giving to this reality?
That's creating the experience of.
What meaning am I giving to this reality?
That's creating the experience of fear.
That is the deep work, because a lot of times it can be quite deep and subtle
and hard to be honest with ourselves.
That's why sometimes it's great to have someone you can talk to about it.
But I can say to you today is look into your life at the moment, ask
yourself what you're afraid of.
Now. We took a big hit when COVID happened.
We took a big hit in our business, and I can remember going through
a period of funny it really hot.
You start to create these narratives in your head.
You start to create these pictures or narratives or stories.
And I would, I had trouble sleeping at some points because
I was just like waking up.
And the next thing you know, you've, you've created this entire story.
I'll never speak again.
I'll never have a chance to encourage anyone ever again.
Who'll be pulled, we'd be living in a bus shelter.
I'm not living in a bus shelter and I'm still speaking right, right here with you.
Right.
But it's an amazing, the meaning I could give to it.
And the meaning you can give to things.
This is hard.
So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, yeah, I get it.
I know what you're saying, but why aren't we all doing it?
I think we're not doing it because it's actually really hard.
We've, we've, uh, we've adapted to instantaneous, meaning this means
this, this means this I'm afraid.
You know, if you want to ask someone out on a date and if you're
married, don't do this by the way.
Um, but if you're not married and you want to ask someone out, I don't know.
Some people get really nervous.
I used to because it's like death.
It's like, if they say no, I'm going to die and your brain's going, oh yes.
If they say no, you'll just drop dead on the spot.
But we create these stories.
Don't we carry these narrative.
You can often pick it up by things like, you know, you'll be saying,
what if or you'll use language?
Like what if this happens or, or I will never, or if this happens, I will,
like, you can look at the language, the cognitive language that you're using.
All right.
So the summary of this message would be, there are objective things that are
going to cause fear, but they're in a relatively small class and you don't
encounter them very often, but there's plenty of fear washing through the world.
And again, our media system just profits off it massively.
I mean, can you imagine turning your television on it's like CNN or Fox or
whatever you watch and, and it's like, and the lead story is everything's good.
The world is great.
There is no conflict.
The world is getting better.
You'd be sitting there going, um, uh, anything else and they're just like, Nope,
the world is good, but what do we get?
We get the story guy.
Ah, we're all going to die.
Everyone's was going to be dead by tomorrow.
The world's going to catch fire.
Everyone's going to die in explosions and death and stuff and hunger.
And you're all going to go broke.
And I bring us fear.
Yes, it's right.
It's true.
We jump into the narrative and off we go.
You know, strangely as a species, we're doing better than you'd think.
And I always, since I often say to people, you know, the world seems bad right now,
and there are genuine problems in the world, but we have flushing toilets.
And no matter how bad the world is, I don't think you'd want to have
lived at any other time in history.
Right.
Because of flushing, toilets.
As he is, you know, like, you know, cabled, sport, TV, you know, just,
there's a lot of great stuff in the world.
It just wasn't there.
So we don't need to buy too much into the fear narrative.
If terrible things happen, you are going to adapt no matter what
happens, you're going to adapt.
You're going to be just fine.
All right. That's it for me today.
Do not let yourself be overcome by fear.
Look deeply into the meanings, the stories that you're telling yourself
when you encounter fearful situations.
And you're going to be just fine.
You can grow this might take years, but just get it in your head.
Start working on it.
Start going.
What am I thinking?
What meaning am I describing?
And then ask yourself, can you find a better meaning?
All right, please make sure you've subscribed.
Grab yourself a free copy of my book, bridging the gap, check out the other
links, wherever you're listening or watching my name's Jonathan Doyle.
And I'm going to have another message for you tomorrow.