Fear and How to Overcome It

I had the honor to appear as a guest this week on Adam Hill’s Flow Over Fear Podcast. I met Adam through my friends at the Brand Builders Group and he’s someone who really personifies their vision for a mission driven messenger. His show is all about the relationship between flow and fear and his mission to help people learn how to get into flow and stay in it, despite of any fear.

To prepare for the recording, I listened to a bunch of Flow Over Fear episodes and not only enjoyed them but also learned a lot. I highly recommend you all check out the show! My episode won’t be out for a few weeks but I’ll let you all know when it’s available.

Fear is something I’ve written about before here in Profit+ and the article has been one of the most popular and widely shared. Other newsletter writers have even quoted it—see here.

In spending a lot of time thinking about fear again this week, I realized that for most of my life I’ve been fighting with 3 distinct kinds of fear:

1. The Fear of Being Wrong

2. The Fear of Loss

   &

3. The Fear of Public Speaking.

Fortunately, these days at least, I feel like I’m winning! Through a lot of introspection and hard, deep work over the last decade, I’ve figured out, not how to “get over” these fears but rather how to effectively manage and use them.

It’s unfortunate, by the way, that we’ve developed this “get over fear” phraseology as a cultural construct because it just doesn’t work that way. Fear is not something that can be gotten over, conquered, or eliminated from life. It can only be managed and used. It took me a very long time in life to figure this out.

I think fear is best understood as a kind of signal. Unfortunately, it’s a rather tricky one to interpret. First of all, you need some baseline level of conscious awareness to even figure out what you are dealing with. For some reason, whenever fear makes an appearance, we become especially susceptible to the powerful forces of our subconscious. So often we act out of fear and don’t even know it! The first step in managing fear is to become aware, which takes a fair bit of training in things like introspection and mindfulness.

Assuming you can get past the awareness hurdle, then the task becomes figuring out exactly what you are afraid of and why. And this is a whole other psychological challenge. You think it would be easy to figure out why you are afraid but it’s just not so. Outside of acute fears like “OMG, there is a wild animal chasing me!” the truth of fear is hidden behind a veil of ego-induced obfuscation. Basically, the ego is so uncomfortable with fear that it will fill your mind with a whole bunch of confusing and conflicting information about both what you are afraid of and why. For some reason, it would rather you just keep running away. But it is only in the process of choosing to consciously engage with fear that you can learn its truth.

So, you must face your fears. That’s a key for sure but it’s not that simple, for the “facing your fear” part will only take you so far. There’s another crucial step that involves coming to an understanding about yourself in the process.

What do I mean by this?

For much of my life, I have struggled with the fear of being wrong. You see, growing-up I happened to be very good at things like school and standardized tests and was constantly praised and rewarded for it. How can that be a bad thing? Well, it turns out that thinking of the real world and the various challenges of life as a series of homework and tests can be rather problematic. Obviously, the real world just doesn’t work that way! Not even close. There’s almost never one “right” answer to a situation and thinking that there is one makes you do all kinds of stupid things.

So much of my sense of self was tied up with this school success archetype that over time I developed a deeply engrained subconscious belief that A) there’s always a right answer and B) I have to find it. This manifested in my life in the form of a tendency for indecision and an unwillingness to confront the truth when things don’t go according to plan. Let me tell you, these are both very dangerous tendencies, especially for someone trying to be an entrepreneur, where you need to be uber-decisive, and an investor, where you need to maintain an open and flexible mind at all times and address any bad decisions that you’ve made immediately. So, I let decisions linger so long that course of events just made them for me and was often so afraid of being wrong that I would ignore the very obvious signs that I had made a bad decision. My fear imposed a kind of willful blindness upon me, where I literally refused to see the truth. Of course, my problems, left alone as they were, just got worse.

It took me a very long time to reckon with my fear of being wrong. I wasn’t even aware of it until my first company was in a moment of crisis and I found myself in a situation where the simplicity of my one right answer worldview was called into serious question. For a whole bunch of reasons we can get into another day, I felt morally compelled to blow the whole thing up. At that moment in time, this was particularly problematic because this path, while it felt completely right, was certainly the most financially risky. It looked like it was going to be such a mess legally that going down this path could prove seriously detrimental to the financial interests of my investors and myself. There was a chance, after all this hard work, we could all make nothing or worse actually lose a bunch of money—a very scary proposition.

While unwinding the company took 7 years, cost millions in unnecessary legal expenses, and caused a ton of stress and heartache, I’m so glad I did it. Not only did I do what was right in following my moral call to action, but also, somehow managed to both blow the company up and make it a great financial success in the process. Uncovering my fear of being wrong and the extent to which it was influencing my life was the ultimate value to this crisis though.

These days, I still catch myself now and then acting under the sway of the fear of being wrong. I’ll make an obviously bad business decision and take way too long to admit it to myself. Or I’ll make a bad investment in the market and hold on way too long rather than just selling the position and moving on. But these are becoming increasingly rare occurrences, thankfully. Now that my awareness is up, what I do with the fear of being wrong is try to use it to help me make better decisions.

When you tap in to the incredible upside of fear, you find both the motivation and the necessary energy to do what must be done. Fear is literally the force you need when you are faced with the necessity of some hard, serious, or risky work. It helps you eliminate distracting thoughts and focus your mind and will to the present moment and the precise issue at hand. It clarifies, simplifies, and helps you understand what’s most important. By reminding you what you are truly capable of, it makes you feel alive and ennobles your spirit. Fear can be all these things or it can be a mind killer. The choice is yours.

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