Life is one of those things that’s always constant. We will have ups and we will have downs. That is the 50/50 principle. Yet even when we fully comprehend the 50/50 principle, we often become very apprehensive and resist those elements of pain. We develop certain fears because there are constant elements in our life that we don’t like to face. Our life, we often have three constant fears in our life. These fears do not go away, and we are often faced with them on recurring instances. These peers often are the cause of us holding back and not realizing our dreams. These three fears often lead us down the road to regret and resentment. These three fears will show up no matter whether we are wanting to have a relationship with our wife or take the first step down that uncertain road known as entrepreneurship. These three fears often flare up because they involve and affect our motivational drive. This allows for our mind to spin and create fantastic stories of how we’re going to die in a field if we try to talk to our wife more often. They found themselves lynched by a gang of hunger cannibals if we progress down the road of trying our own business. We may become kitty chow for a sabertooth tiger if we try something as audacious as asking for a raise. So let’s look at the three biggest fears in our life.
The 3 Fears
Yes, our life is fearful. There are things out there that can cause us irreparable.. A circular saw can cut off a finger or worse. The chainsaw leaves us before we even realize what’s happening. We are even afraid to cross the street because we may be hit by a bus. Now, honestly, we’re not so much afraid that we will die from being hit by a bus, but we’re actually more afraid of surviving that bus hit and the world of pain that we would be in afterwards.
Many of our decisions are based upon the thoughts of what might happen. We have all these worries that we heap upon our life, which often sound like they are useful. However, they are the farthest thing from being useful. How is the boss saying no to a raise, going to benefit us when we’re worrying about it? Worrying about what the boss is going to say doesn’t matter. If he says no, then OK, it means no, you don’t get the raise, and if he says yes, that’s great. That’s awesome. There’s no life-threatening effect with asking the boss for a raise. Yet so many people front over that thinking that if the boss says no, that also means that he’s going to whip out a sword and lop off your noggin. So worrying about a potential fear is you burning up twice as much energy on something you don’t even know the results of. But this does lead us into our first big fear.
The Fear of the Unknown
You’re a little kid lying in bed. The lights are out and the closet is ajar. Our mind loves to work towards a negative, because nothing exemplifies this better than a child believing they see something in a closet. There are no lights, but George sees something in the closet. And they let their mind run wild and sooner or later they’re running into the parent’s room, shaking and crying because something’s in the closet and there was something in the shirt they didn’t hang up.
Even now as an adult, your mind is a little more sophisticated in the fears that it creates, but it is creating just the same type of fear all because you do not know what it is as a result. We have a fear of the unknown. Any major change to a routine causes elements of concern. All of a sudden, your wife is hanging out with somebody new on a constant basis, and she used to never do that. What are you making that mean? These fears of the unknown cause our mind to run rampant. We will tell ourselves again all types of stories, and many of them actually do not make any sense. Yet we will believe them, and we will act upon those thoughts. This is where much of the model comes into play. Because when you start paying attention to what your thoughts are, you can catch the lies that your mind wants to tell you a lot faster. If you want to see how to stop this, I suggest you try coaching.
Man has been afraid of the unknown since the very beginning of time. The barbarians at the gate assume that they are out to kill us, but who knows maybe they’re just trying to sell Avon. Yet we’ve heard many stories of what happens when those gates are open and the barbarians rush in and they rape the horses and ride off on the women.
The Fear of Learning
As mentioned many times before, our brain operates in motivational triumph. That means that seeking pleasure avoids pain and wants to do that as efficiently as possible. That is why we fear learning something new so much. It violates all three of the motivational triad. Learning something is not pleasurable. It is awkward. It’s weird when we’re clumsy at it. We may become embarrassed. That’s very painful. We may be told that we’re wrong. That’s embarrassing. That’s painful and then it’s hard and it takes a lot of energy to learn new skills. That’s why we fear having to learn new stuff so much. We would rather do it the old ineffective way, because at least we can zone out on that task instead of trying to learn a better way to do stuff. This is one reason why it is so detrimental to say hear well, that’s how we’ve always done it. We don’t like to grow. We don’t as humans like to do unfamiliar things. Yet we also enjoy the novelty if we know that that experience is going to be a pleasant one. The problem with trying something new to better your relationship with your wife is that you don’t know how your wife is going to respond. The fear of learning is a huge problem for anybody that wants to better their life. That is because we realize That What we’re currently doing is helping us in any fashion. If we wanna have a more fulfilling life, we have to make changes, and those changes require us to learn new skills, and this is one reason why we find ourselves wanting to just sit back on the couch watching the game, Instead of turning the television off and doing something that requires some learning.
The Fear of Failing
Another big fear that we have is the fear that we’re going to fail at what we try. And it’s not so much that it’s going to cause us problems in that if we try something new and it doesn’t work out, but we are afraid of the judgment that we will receive from other people because we failed. Yes, failing may mean that we have to try something again and may have to step back a step or two. Yet the big fear of failing is what is our wife going to think? What are our friends going to think? What are our enemies going to think? Now that sounds awfully strange doesn’t it? Why would we care what our enemies think, yet that is often a thought people will have about their failures. What is sister Bertha, Better than you gonna say when she finds out that I didn’t get the position? Well, the real answer is we don’t care. Yet for some reason we do.
Fear causes us to do really interesting things that go against all logic. The fear of failing is no exception.
We become afraid that we will be judged for our failures, but what do we make those judgments actually mean? If you really look deep down, we’re afraid we’re going to become ostracized. We’re gonna become the laughingstock of the town, yet there has never been an example of that actually happening in modern society. Yeah, back in the Stone Age that may have been the case, but not today.
How do you not be afraid?
The way you stop being afraid is a bit counterintuitive. To not be afraid, you have to stop resisting the fear. Except for the fact that yeah, you are afraid of blankness. Except that you are afraid, except the fact that you may fail, except the fact that you do not know what the outcome truly is going to be. Except for the fact that yeah, you’re what if your enemy judges you. It doesn’t affect you in any way. Yeah it feels a little awful. It feels a little embarrassing, but the unknown. Will become knowledge. And this happens because we take courage and make it action. You say to stop being afraid of doing something, you have to develop skills in doing that task. If you wanna figure out how to become a better conversationalist with your wife, you have to ask dumb questions before you get to the smart questions. You have to make attempts at being a good conversationalist before you become a good conversationalist.
So to have skill, you have to start with courage to even try. The action takes that inexperience and through time and effort will convert it into competence, from competence becomes skill, and with a skill, you can master it. Eventually, you won’t even think about what you have to do, you will just do it. And you accept what the outcome is
Knowledge is power
As you get better at developing your skills, you will have more successes. But to have those successes, you have to fail. You have to learn what not to do so you understand what to do. So you have to learn what is bad knowledge before you get good knowledge. Some people who become very lucky and don’t have to go through that struggle will often find themselves in trouble because they will be faced with the challenges that you’ve already had, and they won’t know what to do.
So to gather knowledge and be able to do stuff that you wanna do is the epitome of all, if you have to do it scared. You’re going to go and learn how to talk to your wife, scared you’re going to worry about. Are you doing the new task correctly, that worry is tapped into fear. We’re always gonna have fear. You cannot get rid of fear in your life. You can, however, except that you have that fear and learn how to work with it. The currency to have the life you dreamed of is paid through discomfort. So get ready to fail, get ready to have those setbacks. Throw the fit, feel sorry for yourself, then pick yourself back up and do it again.
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