How to Overcome Fear November 22, 2009
Posted by Mike in : Mike, Motivation , trackbackHow do you overcome fear? Fear of meetings. Fear of failure. Fear of what your friends and family will think. Fear of anything that does not actually harm you, like public speaking. Some people fear that more than death.
There are two ways to overcoming fear:
The first is by brute force. You vomit in the bathroom, pop a mint, then walk into that boardroom. It’s best to start slow however. The idea is, it becomes like resistance training with weights. You start off light and work up gradually increasing the weights. Each new situation will always hurt, but the light weights you lifted when you started don’t hurt at all anymore.
Fear is like that. Things that scared you as a child no longer do…except for clowns of course. However, overcoming fear by brute force is inefficient. Takes time and a lot of pain.
There is a second approach. Eliminating fear altogether.
Sounds crazy. How do you eliminate fear? Isn’t fear helpful? Yes it is but only in the fight or flight response that comes from a life-threatening situation. It is in the non-threatening situations like public speaking where fear is detrimental to the success of that meeting. As we all say to ourselves, “If I can just relax, be myself, sound professional, don’t mess up, then I will be successful”. That is true to some extent and that knowledge increases the tension, compounding the problem.
The truth is that fear shows that you have made a fundamental error in your perception of reality.
Take for example an overheard work conversation. You hear your boss around a corner speaking to someone else saying “I’m going to have to fire Mike tomorrow, he does not know it yet so don’t tell anyone”. The rest of the day you see people looking at you odd, your gut hurts, you go home and go over all you did and think about what can you change. It’s only the next day at 8am you find out he was talking about Mike in accounting, not you.
All that fear you felt was wrong. Fear is just telling you that you need to change your reality. It’s a warning sign that you’ve got something wrong. You had an illusion about what reality was when it was not.
Now this is going to get a little trippy here, so bear with me.
Have you ever been in a dream and you wake fully frightened and say “I thought for sure it was real!”. You had a fundamental flaw in your perception of reality while you were coming out of a dream state. If you had known that it was a dream, you would have no fear. If you dreamt you were on stage, but knew you were dreaming, you would not care if the audience laughed at you or not, you’d just walk off stage, perhaps flip them off, but you would not have any fear.
All fear is just a perception. And in actuality, all reality is just your perception using your ears, touch, smell, sight, etc. If you could view all reality as if it were a dream, a dream that you own, then you would have no fear.
Usually the cause of the fear is something pretty basic, such as: you don’t want to make people unhappy, and if they’re unhappy, they think less of you and you start to feel unhappy about yourself.
I tried this technique in a board room where I was selling software I had created. I envisioned about an hour before the meeting that it was a dream. I put the people in their spots and saw them all sitting there, talking.
I said, if I’m in a dream, and I don’t get this gig, I’d just shrug, shake their hands and move on.
I go into the meeting, and I’m still breathing heavy. But I look around and keep saying to myself “I’m in a dream. I’m in a dream.”
As we go around and talk, I’m selling my product and the main guy in the room leans back, smiles and says in a condescending voice to the group, “Well, you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true.” Now normally, I would have laughed and gone: “Haha, well that’s true but…blah blah blah”.
Instead, something clicked in me and I responded like it was a dream. I leaned forward, looked him right in the eye and go in a slow, firm voice, “Then don’t buy it.”
He leans back quick and goes “NO! I just never heard anyone say anything like that before. Please tell me more”. It was surreal…and fun.
Now this technique can take time, try it in a cafe or while walking down a street. Look at everything around you and view it as if it’s a dream. When you can effectively do that, you will get an overwhelming feeling of peace. Do that in a board meeting, on stage, talking to anyone who’s threatening you, and you will be yourself and answer honestly.
View your life as if in a dream and all fear will fade away. If I had some fancy Budda thing to say I’d insert it here…but all of you reading this are a dream anyway so I’m done.
Comments»
I would add that forcing yourself to think you’re in a dream means that you no longer fear consequences. Just like in Groundhog day, when the main guy realized no one would remember the things he did, he was free to act exactly as he pleased.
By telling the board guy “Don’t buy it,” you’re directly addressing the issue he’s skirting. Prentending you’re talking to a good friend allows you this confidence. That’s what you would say in your imagination, right? It’s what you would say in those reruns of the conversation that you have in your head. So say it. Stop just imagining it. That’s what the dream is about.