Steve Pavlina recently did the same sort of thing in a recent blog entry called Fanatical About Growth. He wrote:

The goals that interest me most are the ones that cause me to say to myself, “Wow… I’m really not sure if I’m cut out for this. This looks pretty damned tough. I’m going to have to push myself to a whole new level in order to make it to the end. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to pull this off.”

But then I think to myself, “What if I fail? No big deal. At least I’ll know where my limits are. But what if I succeed? How awesome would that be? I’d gain an incredible new reference experience for the rest of my life. I’d have an amazing experience to share with others. And what new challenges might I tackle beyond this one?” That’s the kind of thinking that excites me.

I find this interesting because if I was in the same position, I’d have very different self-talk. It would be more along the lines of, “What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough? I’m not sure I can handle that.” Notice, oddly enough, my self-talk isn’t specific, it’s universal about all of me rather than, say my level of self-discipline, and it doesn’t include anything about being able to improve things, as if failing this once means that’s the end of the game and that’s only as good as I can ever be. That’s the epitome of taking it personally. Additionally, I wanted to point out that I asked “what if I don’t measure up? What if I’m not good enough?” while Pavlina said “I’ll know where my limits are.”

According to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, at the bottom of every one of your fears is that you can’t handle what life throws at you, or what you throw at yourself. In the above example, Steve Pavlina has turned a physiological state of arousal into an exciting challenge. I might have seen it as a fear of the unknown, but he sees it as excitement and discovering and mapping out new territory.

I’ve been exposed to a new theory of what emotions might be. They may be a way to size up a situation or a problem quickly, formulate the problem and then try to solve it. However, you can obviously size up things differently and your emotional gut reaction might be different from the one that you might choose consciously. So, I suggest you question your initial gut assumptions and sizing up of a situation, perhaps you will find that what you interpret as a fear or failure or a fear of the unknown into excitement over discovery or exploring new territory, knowing that as you explore, the territory actually grows bigger and there’s more to explore.

What I want to emphasize with all of this is that your emotions are not just your emotions and they’re not all-knowing and always “right”, you can have some conscious control over them. You can see things not as fear inducing, but as exciting, and they’re both “right”. I would choose exciting because that is simply more empowering for me. I hope this helps, and I’d really appreciate your thoughts in the comments to let me know someone’s reading. :-p

The key to making this change was something I wrote about in the very first article I posted on this site, The Courage to Live Consciously. I had to remain aware of the change I wanted to make while accepting that I wasn’t yet strong enough to make it. By keeping myself out of denial, I was able to progressively train myself to reach my goal, even though it would take many years to finally reach it.

30-day trials are a terrific vehicle for achieving readiness. Even if your first trial doesn’t result in permanent change, you’ll learn and grow from the experience. This will put you in a position to kick off additional trials in preparation for an eventual permanent change. My previous raw trials were essential stepping stones for me.

…

Five years ago if you asked me if I’d eventually become a raw foodist, I’d probably have said, “Yes, I expect I will at some point.” I didn’t know how long it would take, but I thought I’d eventually discover how to make it work.

Why do I think the above is so important? Because it gives you an immense sense of security when you know you’re going to continue growing. You can look at something that scares the hell out of you square in the face and say, yea, I’ll be able to handle this someday. Even if you can’t see the path to how you’re going to do it.

As an example, I know I’ll be a millionaire someday. It’s not even a question anymore, because by saving as little as 4 dollars a day from the age of 20-65 at 10% will give you over 1 million dollars and I’ve started to do that. The question is when and how I’ll become a millionaire. I may become a millionaire or enjoy a financially independent life style way before then. In fact, its starting to look like I will even though I have plenty of obstacles to fight through, including those that I cannot see. But I know I can handle them because I will keep growing and become stronger. I expect to have 1000 dollars a month from passive income in 5 years although I want it sooner. I know that the current path of growth I’m on will lead me there in all likelihood.

That is not all, though. I also feel that in terms of spiritual beliefs, I will probably end up with the ones that work the best for me.

Basically, as long as you keep trying, you’ll get there.

Paul Pitrowski‘s hit the nail on the head that fear is a filter that actually works without drawing attention to itself. Sorta like how you see through your eyes but how often do you think about your eyes? They’re filtering the world all the time, if by no other way than by simply limiting our vision to the “visible spectrum”. Fear works in the same way. It’s like invisible blinders. Fear prevents you from thinking about that great idea you have but don’t have the courage to follow through on. Fear can prevent you from even looking at the issues that you can easily overcome because you are an idea generating machine and fear stops that from working.

Here’s a tip I’ve picked up from Tim Ferriss‘ The 4-Hour Work Week: Figure out exactly what your worst fear would be. The absolute worst situation that you could find yourself in and accept those fears. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how most of the undefined fears we carry with us are actually very easy to overcome once they’ve been defined.

For example, I’ve been thinking about passive income and traveling and having a sense of dread about it. Once I got down to it and decided to fear-set, I realized that one of my fears was that I started to use this passive income on a monthly basis and became dependent on it and then it disappeared, leaving me in a lurch and without any money. I was scared of traveling because of that. Then I thought about it and realized that that’s not so bad. I have many options: including creating more sources of passive income, improving my current sources, I could even get a job for money, I could borrow money, I had many options and there would be no reason not to travel.

So, this is my strategy for overcoming fear:

1. Remember that courage is a muscle used to overcome fear.

2. If I feel scared, I do what makes me scared. Sometimes I don’t, but the constant trying builds my courage muscle.

3. Remember that sometimes it’s not fear I feel but a good kind of heightened awareness, called eustress which feels a lot like fear or nervousness but it’s a good thing. Like in 300, “It is not fear that grips him, but a heightened sense of things.”

4. Figure out the worst case scenario for this fear and I’ll usually feel the fear just dissolve and I’m left with an issue to deal with which I can usually do. As Ferriss says, “Defining fear = conquering fear.”

5. Do it!

• Above all, trust your own experience. I recommend a week-long media fast to help you to figure out whether this is a change you want to make.
• You waste a ridiculous amount of time watching ads or channel surfing through ads. At one estimate it was at about 20 minutes of every hour of TV watching is ads. That’s a third of your time that you are giving over to people who want to sell you things. And even unconscious exposure can increase liking, so they are likely succeeding.
• Watching TV violence does increase aggressiveness, and that does not necessarily mean physical aggression. Do you really want to submit those who you care about to aggression of any kind, including verbal, emotional or the obvious physical?
• Television is fear-inducing. TV can influence you to be more afraid for your personal safety than you need to be. Watching violence on TV can influence how much violence you believe is in the real world, due to the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is basically how we use the ease with which we can remember or imagine events to judge how likely or frequent they are. For example, estimate how many homicides will be committed in New York in 2008, a city of 19 million people? Do it. Unless you do it, we’re not moving this train. Ok? One estimate suggests 500 people. Were you off? Another thing is that it can affect how you feel about being personally assaulted. That is, more television violence can increase your own fear of being personally assaulted because you feel it is more likely to happen than it actually is (depending on where you live).
• TV is not without ideologies as are most things and the constant messages about how to live your life may well be counter to what you might actually want to do. As an example, there’s an episode of Family Guy where Joe Swanson the paraplegic gets his legs back and promptly starts excersizing and becomes uber healthy. He also acts like a real jerk to his friends as if he’s better than them. He then ditches his friends and finds some new friends that like to excersize and enjoy life instead of sitting around drinking beer and watching TV. His friends, in retaliation (and understanding that their lives suck, it is alluded to in the show there), try to break his legs and eventually his wife ends up shooting him a bunch of times and at the end of the episode everything is back to normal. If that doesn’t sound like its promoting values antithetical to conscious development, I dunno what does. As soon as Joe does become better than the guys, he starts to act like a jerk? And even though he outgrows his friends, they drag him back down to their level, which they admit is a crappy level. It’s almost as if they can’t stand to be reminded that they do nothing with their lives and have to drag another person down to their level. Don’t worry, I don’t brutalize most TV shows like this, but this episode really struck me. Ask what your favourite shows stand for and what your favourite characters represent.

All that said, there are a few shows I love to watch, including House, MD, the Office, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.