5 - The End of Fear As You Know It

Welcome to the end of fear as you know it. Now this is a bold claim and I'm going to totally back it up. So let's dive in. So living in constant fear in the metaphor we're using is like driving your boat drunk. You are almost completely incapacitated. You're going to make huge mistakes. Your awareness is significantly lowered and it's just an awful, awful idea. And yet, so

many entrepreneurs live in a state of constant fear and constant impairment is literally the same as being intoxicated except it's not even fun. So here's the problem. So many entrepreneurs live in near constant fear. They're constantly afraid of not making enough money, not closing that client, not being good enough, not building the business that they want. All of these things, entrepreneurs are on a constant treadmill of

problems and often they let these problems turn into a constant treadmill of fear. And when this happens, it sabotages their higher thinking capabilities and it creates more fear because they're then less capable of dealing with problems and each problem creates more fear. There is a very, very potent effect that fear has in the brain. It completely shuts down your prefrontal cortex, your higher reasoning capabilities when it

gets strong enough and it literally impairs you. So the next problem that fear causes is fear sort of naturally makes you think of this big, hazy cloud of unknown. Fear tends to come from a lack of specificity about what you're actually afraid of. If you sit down with an entrepreneur or anybody but entrepreneurs is what we're talking about in this context and say, well, what are you

afraid of? What is this? What are you actually afraid of? At first, they'll give you a really vague answer in most cases and they'll say something like running out of money and you can be like, well, how would that happen? What would that look like? What would you actually do if that were to happen? And as soon as you get specific and they say something like, well,

I guess it would happen if I lost this client and if that happened, I'd have to pull so many out of savings and maybe borrow some money from my brother and then I'd probably be okay as long as I got a client within 30 days or maybe I'd have to pick up a part-time job to pay the bills and that'd be bad but I wouldn't be homeless.

As soon as they get specific, the emotion tends to go away and it turns into more of just a strategy or a plan but most people are not specific. They have this big hazy fog over them of fear and of unknown and it completely impairs their ability to work at a high level. So the final problem is related to this, most entrepreneurs never confront their fears. They

spend so much time, especially in the early stages, avoiding things and being overwhelmed and being scared of things that they never actually dig in and they never realize that there's not really anything to fear. If you talk to high-level entrepreneurs, they'll tell you that they've learned to confront their fear. They've learned that beyond their fears is just more learning and it's never as bad as they think

but early stage entrepreneurs haven't quite learned this lesson. So these are all interrelated problems and they are horrible and you do not want to suffer from fear. You do not want to live in fear. You want to be able to overcome fear and see right through it. So here is what we want. We want you to have a life completely free of fear except for rare occasions

because fear is a natural phenomena that has use, can be very useful. So when it does come up, you want to be able to deal with it and use it as a slingshot. Use it to actually push you forward. When you only experience fear periodically instead of on a daily basis, you can actually use it as a slingshot. Second, you want to have your fears crystal clear.

You want to know what they are and you want to keep in touch with them. You want to have an intimate relationship with your fears. You want to know what would happen, what would need to happen in order for your fears to occur, how you can keep that from happening and if that does happen, how to recover from it. Why it won't actually be an issue in

the long term. And finally, you want to have learned on an emotional level that running towards your fear is the single best thing that you can do because fear is the only thing that gets smaller, the closer you get. The closer you get to your fears, the more specific you get about them, the more you actually experience them, the more you confront them, the more you feel

them, the smaller they get until they blink out of existence and you wonder what you were ever afraid of in the first place. Fear is the only thing that gets smaller the closer you get. So here's the process that we're going to go through and this is taken from Tim Ferriss, I should give him credit, and it is an incredibly powerful exercise. So you start out by

writing down everything you fear in as much detail as possible. Just list all of your fears, absolutely everything, do not leave any stone unturned. Then for each fear, you want to write down what you could do to prevent it from happening. If you're afraid of running out of money, what can you do to make sure you don't run out of money? If you're afraid of losing a

key client, what can you do to make sure that client is happy? If you are afraid of not being good at something, what can you do to make sure that you practice enough? Write down what you can do to prevent it from happening. Then in the next step, imagine if this happens, if you run out of money, if you lose that client, if you suck at that

skill, what can you do to return to your current? State. How can you get back to exactly where you are? If you run out of money, how can you make this amount of money again? If you lose that key client, how can you get another key client? You usually find that it's actually not that hard. If you were to lose everything, and God forbid become homeless or

go to jail or something extreme, you could actually get back exactly to where you are in a relatively short amount of time. And that is tremendously empowering. Finally, keep adding to this list. Anytime you feel a new fear, add it to your list. Anytime you feel an old fear, look at your list and remind you, remind yourself that there's not as much to fear as you feel.

So I'm going to go through and share the process with you right now. So it's a quick workbook. So here's how it works. You just have a little template. Write your fear. What can I do to prevent this from happening? If this happens, what can I do to return to where I am today? And then every time you're just going to copy it and copy it again,

and you're probably going to have 20 to 30 of these copied because it's natural to have a whole lot of fears at this stage. And you should end up with a whole sheet of a ton of fears, a ton of action plans, and a ton of recovery plans. This exercise will change your life. For added power, hand write this. I hand wrote this the first time I

did it, and it had a tremendous, tremendous effect on me. So that is fear setting. A lot of people set goals. Few people set fears. Fear setting can actually be more powerful if your life is dominated by fear. So if you're comfortable, when you're done setting your fears, share them in the Facebook community or share a smaller version of them in the Facebook community if you're not

completely comfortable. You'll be amazed by how many people share your fears and how posting them publicly can actually diminish them. So that's how to set fears. And like I said, it's a big promise, but you'll see as soon as you do the exercise, the way you look at fear will never quite be the same because fear is always worse in anticipation and fear is the only thing

that gets smaller, the closer you go to it. I will see you guys in the next video.