What’s Really Holding You Back?

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality”

Why do we let fear control our experiences when 99.9% of the things we worry about never end up happening?!

Can you imagine how different your life would be if your thoughts weren’t constantly  self-defeating?

While fear can be beneficial to us in some cases, like keeping us away from dangerous situations, it can also be damaging by preventing us from growing and living a peaceful life. Think about all of the opportunities you’ve missed by letting fear take over.

I think that the most inspiring people I’ve met seem to be fearless. They aren’t afraid to speak up, take risks, and can talk to virtually anybody confidently. How did they get to be this way?

Being curious, I listened to a podcast with a series of interviews about becoming fearless. One of interviewees, in the podcast, described how he got over one of his biggest fears- swimming. By the end of 3 months, he had not only learned how to swim, but ended up swimming two miles in the ocean. He describes how he felt in this moment: invincible. Not only did he conquer his fears, he mastered them. He explains how this experience led him to the realization that he had the capability to achieve much more than he had thought and that he had been letting fear limit his whole life.

At the end of the podcast, another interviewee revealed one of his strategies to overcoming his daily fears. He calls it fear-setting. His strategy has three parts:

Define, Prevent, Repair. 

He said that writing out your fears is key to putting them to rest. So, he has a journal where he divides his pages into define, prevent, and repair columns.

In the first column, he defines his fear. For example: “I won’t do well on my presentation next week”.

In the second, he writes what he can do to prevent this from happening like “I will practice 10 times this week”.

In the third column, he writes how he can repair the situation if the bad things happens anyways: “I will realize that I’m not perfect and there is room for growth”.

 

If you wan’t to learn more about the insights from this practice, look up Tim Ferriss. I believe he also has a Ted Talk that you can watch on the topic!