Hi, I'm Dr. John Demartini.
Have you ever been confronted by having a major fear,
over doing the thing that you say you want to do in life?
And you maybe got immobilized by it?
I'd like to share with you some insights about overcoming or dissolving
or understanding the fear failure.
So I'm going to do a little bit of all of that. First of all,
fear is an assumption that you're about to experience in the
future, through your senses or imagination, more negatives than positives,
more pains than pleasures, more losses than gains,
more disadvantages than advantages from somebody or yourself.
I want to say that one again. I want you to really get that and sink that in.
Fear is an assumption that you're about to experience through your senses or
imagination in the future,
more negatives than positives, more pains than pleasures,
more losses than gains,
more disadvantages than disadvantages from somebody or yourself.
Now the source of those fears, most people think,
'Oh, I got to get rid of my fear',
but the source of those fear are actually the opposite.
The opposite of phobia, fear, is fantasy or philia.
So they're like two poles of a magnet.
You got a negative pole and a positive pole.
If you set a goal that you assume in the future
through your senses or imagination is going to give you more positives than
negatives, more pleasures than pains, more advantages than disadvantages,
more gains than losses, and you create a fantasy of the future,
your mind and brain is designed to bring
out the unconscious phobia to let you know you're striving for
a philia, a fantasy.
In other words your nightmare is a by-product of your addiction to a fantasy.
When you do a goal, whatever the goal is,
there's going to be advantages and disadvantages, pleasures and pains,
positives and negatives in the achievement of it.
So if you set up a fantasy and not a true goal,
you're designed to have the phobia come in to let you become
aware of the negative side to the fantasy,
so you can set a real goal in advance.
And it's not your enemy to get rid of, it's your friend. Believe it or not,
your fear is your friend.
It's letting you know when you're setting up a fantasy instead of a true
balanced objective goal.
The reason why we call it goals and objectives is because objectivity means even
mindedness.
And when you're setting a fantasy of what you think is a goal that has all
positive outcomes,
you're actually blinding yourself and you're unconscious of the negatives.
Let me give you another example.
Let's say you meet somebody and you're infatuated with them and you,
you you're seeing the positives, but you're ignoring the negatives.
You're conscious of the positives, unconscious of the negatives.
Your intuition is trying to bring up the negatives,
it's trying to say be careful, there's something missing here,
you're not seeing the whole thing. Eventually over time,
you discover that there was negatives and you find out the downside to the
person you were infatuated with. But they were there the whole time,
but you were blind to it. And that's the same thing in their goal.
Many people set a goal, that's actually a fantasy,
thinking they've got an objective goal and they set up a fantasy that's got all
positive outcomes and their mind automatically simultaneously emerges a phobia,
a fear, to let them know that that's not a balanced goal yet.
So as long as you're addicted to philias, you have to have phobias.
As long as you're addicted to fantasies,
you're going to keep experiencing nightmares, anxieties.
But the second you set a balanced goal that's aligned with your highest value,
neither one of those occur. There's no fantasy, there's no fear.
Because if you're living according to your highest value and you're more
objective, you embrace both pain and pleasure, support and challenge,
positive and negatives, equally in the pursuit. Think about this.
When a boy who loves video games, his highest value's video games,
the second he conquers his video game,
he strives to find a more challenging video game.
He's not looking for a positive without a negative.
He's looking for a challenge in addition to something that's invigorating,
positive and negative together. A real goal has got a balance.
A real objective has a balance,
but a biased fantasy that is skewed to
seeing in the future more positives than negatives,
makes your brain automatically bring up the negatives over the positives to make
your brain balanced, so you set real goals. So your phobia,
the fear of failure, is actually your addiction to a fantasy of success.
As long as you think success is a positive without a negative,
you're going to have the fear of failure.
But at once you see that with this success, this so-called success,
there's pains and pleasures.
I'd rather say that I'm a man on a mission than a successful person.
That's my personal feeling about it. Because success,
the second you think you're successful and you're proud of that success,
you're on your way down. And the second you think your failure,
you're actually going back to high priorities.
What you found is that when you think you're successful,
you de-purpose yourself with low priority actions and when you think you're a
failure you repurpose yourself with high priority actions.
If you stay on high priority actions, and you're more objective,
neither of those emotions rule you.
So the way to transcend the emotions and get in the objective reason is to
set a real goal in real time, that is really balanced,
that's linked to your highest values and then both the fantasy of success and
the fear of failure, disappear. So your fear of failure is not your enemy.
It could be your friend once you understand what's going on in the human psyche,
your brain is trying to keep things balanced.
You grow most at the border of support and challenge, positive and negatives.
You can't get rid of half of it.
In Buddhism they say the desire for that which is unavailable and the desire to
avoid that which is unavoidable is the source of human suffering.
Set real goals with both sides, know and mitigate the risks,
prepare for it, break things down to small bites,
and you don't have the fear of failure because you're now not having the fantasy
of success.
[Inaudible].