Fear, anxiety, probably the biggest barriers to our success and happiness.
Today at Live On Purpose TV, how to overcome fear and anxiety.
I'm guessing
that one of the biggest barriers to success and happiness is fear.
Fear, anxiety, nervousness, a very common human experience but it's something that gets
in our way and sometimes robs us of our joy and success. In some of the other
videos on this channel, I've talked about the fight-or-flight response and how our
brain is wired or designed to protect us from things that are threatening. When we
experience a threat, there's a response in our brain that triggers different
chemicals into our bloodstream and causes that fight-or-flight response,
it's a chemical response. We're not going to go into that so much on this
particular video but you can link to some of the other videos right here in
this playlist or just peruse through the list because we've addressed it in other
places. I want to focus today on some of the paradoxes around fear. Now to
understand this, let's just take a look first at the role that fear plays for us.
It's not a bad thing, okay. If we had no fear, what would happen? Now you might
think if you're an entrepreneur or if you are a very creative person who wants
to accomplish some phenomenal things, that you could get those things done if
you had no fear but honestly, honestly, what if you had no fear at all? We come
to this earth with fears built in to keep us safe. One of the natural fears
that we all have for example is a fear of heights or a fear of falling from
those heights, okay. Why? So that when we perceive that we're in a dangerous
place, we are more careful, more vigilant, we don't go walking off of cliffs, it's
built in to our system so that's the point that I'm trying to make here, fear
serves a legitimate purpose in keeping us safe, preserving our life and allowing
us to live for another day. So we don't want to completely eliminate fear but
let's take a look at how fear works in our mind. I have to tell you a little
story about me when I was younger, I have a twin sister. Hey, Pam, if you're watching.
Pam is my twin sister and we have a birthday about the same time every year.
I finally figured that out a couple of years ago. Anyway, so we got to share our
birthday parties when we were little kids, now this was really fun because she
would invite all her friends, I would involved my friends. As we got to be teenagers, we
got these mixed gender parties that were just fun and anyway, we had a lot of fun
sharing our birthday and I remember one year we got to go to the pool. My dad
worked at a place that had a pool and he was able to secure that pool for us for
our birthday party and so, Pam invited all her friends, I invited all my friends,
we went down to the pool and had a great time. I have to tell you, at the time, and
I think we were, I don't know, 12 maybe, 12 years old, 11 or 12. At the time, I had a
fear of the diving board which seems silly to me now but it was a real thing
then and I just, I don't know if I belly-flopped off of it when I was
younger or something had happened that maybe traumatized me and I'm afraid of
the diving board so any time we would go to the pool as a family for example, I
would just kind of stay away from it and it was not that big a deal because
nobody's pressuring me or encouraging me to go off. Well, birthday party was a
little different because sure shooting, one of my friends suggests, "Hey, everybody!
Let's all go off the diving board." And I am immediately seized with fear, right.
Because I've got this little issue with the diving board and I'm like, no
and I'm scared.
My reaction at that point is completely normal because of my experience with the
diving board but notice that if my fear is normally here, it just went up a
couple of notches, do you see that? It's gone up a couple of notches because now
I'm faced with the potential of having to deal with that thing that I fear and
hopefully, you're doing the translation as we're talking because there's that
thing that you fear, alright, so just put that in place there as we have this
conversation. So what are my choices? And really, anytime we're confronted with our
fear, we got basically two choices, we either face it or we avoid it. Get the
heck out of there, right? What do I want to do? Get out of there. Why? Because my
brain is designed to keep me safe and I've already decided or learned that
that's not safe so I'm not going to go there, I'm going to see if I can retreat so
that option might include, okay, I'm going to get out of the pool, I'm very
nonchalantly going to head on over to the dressing room where there's a bathroom,
nobody's going to question that because people get up and go to the bathroom all
the time, right? I should be fine. So what if I take that course? I avoid going off
that diving board because of my fear, right? And so I go hide in the dressing
room. Probably nobody will notice. Birthday boy! Yeah, I'm not going to get away with
that, right? So two of my friends come in and they first open the door and they're
like, "Where is he? There he is. I see him hiding in the corner. Come on, Paul!" And
they grabbed me by the arms and they start dragging me back out there to face
my fear. Alright, now what's happening to my
fear? First of all, before we go there, notice that when I ran away from my fear,
you know, it got ratcheted up a couple of notches when somebody suggested and then
I hide in the dressing room, she comes back down, right. I'm feeling relieved, I'm
like, dodged a bullet on that one. So I'm like my fear has come down but now, my
two buddies are dragging me back out to the pool and they get me out there on
the deck of the pool. Now what's happening to my fear?
Oh we're ratcheting up, alright. In fact, it's going higher than it went before.
Can you see that? Why? Cause I'm now closer to what I'm afraid of
and as they marched me over to the diving board and like Captain Hook and
his pirate crew, they're going to make me walk the plank and there's no escaping,
I got to do this thing now. So as I'm walking out onto the diving board, do you
see what's happening to my fear? All along is getting ratcheted way up here
to where it's almost unbearable and there's no escaping though.
They're pushing me out there and then I step off of the end of the board and at
this point, folks, I want you to notice something.. My fear has just maxed out,
it can't go any higher. In fact, as soon as I step off at the end of that board, now I
got other things on my mind. I am trying to somehow get my nose plugged and
somehow stop myself in the air which I don't have very good air brakes but I
hit the surface in that water, full force and I sink clear to the bottom of the
pool and about a half hour later, I finally get myself back up to the
surface and I take that first breath of air
and now what happens to my fear? It's way back down. In fact, it's probably
lower than my baseline, there's some reasons for that, but do you see that I'm
totally relieved at this point? I'm feeling so much better now that I'm not
facing my fear anymore. Okay, now let's look at the psychology behind all of
this because we have these two options, we're going to face our fear or we're
going to avoid our fear, we're going to do one of those things. If we face the
fear and go to the diving board, what's going to happen? Our fear is going to
increase short term. What if we run away and go to the dressing room and hide?
Our fear is going to decrease short term. What happens in the long term?
There's a goofy little piece of logic, this is fuzzy logic, I want you to be aware of it.
When we avoid our fear, we feel relief that conditions our brain to believe
erroneously that what we are avoiding really is
dangerous because after all, look how much better I feel when I avoid it and
we train and teach and educate our brain to believe that that thing really is
dangerous even if it's not. So long-term, the next time we get to face that thing
or it presents itself in our life somehow, our fear where our baseline was
here before, we just ratcheted a baseline and now we've got a little higher level
of fear. If we do this long enough, we develop what's called a phobia. A phobia
is a strong irrational fear of something that we have actually conditioned
ourselves to be afraid of and we don't even notice we're doing it because our
subconscious mind just trains us to do that. When we avoid our fear,
we feel relief short-term and we feel an increase of our baseline of fear long
term. We're actually making it worse. When we face our fear, we increase our fear
short term, okay, and remember when I stepped off the end of the diving board
I hit maximum, it's not going to go any higher than that cause now I'm trying to
find my nose, that's as high as it's going to go and then I feel the relief. When
I resolve in the pool and I check and everything's still there and I'm still
in one piece and I'm like, "Oh that wasn't as bad as I thought." And what if I were
to get out of the pool again right there and go back to the diving board, where
would my fear level be? Lower, right? It may still be up a little but it's lower
than it was before because I just experienced the success. What if I do
that ten times in a row? By the end, I'm doing the cannonball, I'm doing the tuck
and roll, I'm doing these fancy stuff off the diving board. Why? Because I'm no
longer afraid. To face our fears increases our fear in the short term but
in the long term, it resolves that fear and allows us to bring our baseline down
so how are we going to overcome fear and anxiety? You got two choices. You're going to
face it or you're going to avoid it, okay. And everything inside of you is telling you
to avoid it, the problem is that's going to increase your fear in the long run.
To face it means you've got to really find the fortitude to get yourself to
tolerate that increase of fear short term because in the long term that's
going to bring it down and resolve it. I'm here everyday at Live On Purpose TV
and curious how many of you are coming back using some of the other videos?
Would you leave a comment below and let me know what your experience has been.