Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I almost didn’t go running this morning, and it was because I was afraid.

I’ve been sitting at an unergonomic desk, and it’s put my arms and legs under strain, so I’ve been getting some aches and pains. I don’t want to injure myself running – partly out of pride, because I always used to tease a colleague every time he came in with a running injury. “Oh, sport is so healthy!”, I’d say.

Now I’m running myself, I don’t want to be the site of cosmic irony.

So as I was debating whether or not to go for a run, I was feeling the aches in my feet and legs. I’d almost decided not to go when I realised that if I didn’t, I’d be giving in to fear. And that’s no kind of a way to live.

As I mentioned last week, I’m starting a new series alongside How Not to Change Your Life. This one’s called How to Be Amazing.

The two are going to have a lot of crossover (and will probably end up in a book together). Today’s post, especially, could have been part of either series, because fear is one of the main things that prevents us from becoming amazing.

Fear keeps us ordinary

The reason we have fear is to protect us. And anything new and different poses a potential risk, a threat. Standing out from the crowd, stepping outside the group norm, is another big risk for a social species.

No surprise, then, that if we think about doing something we haven’t done before, especially if it’s something that people around us aren’t doing, that’s a trigger for fear.

photo credit: Joaquin Villaverde Photography

Fear grabs our attention

The other day, I came home from kayaking and opened the garage door to put my gear away. My wife and my niece had separately gone out, and my niece had, quite rightly but unbeknown to me, set the burglar alarm. I walked into the garage – and triggered the sensor.

Burglar alarms are loud. You do not want to stay around one. I fumbled my keys out, stumbled inside and punched in my code as fast as I could move. Likewise, a good fire alarm makes a noise that you can’t ignore, that gets you hurrying out of the building.

And fear is our mind’s alarm. You don’t want an alarm you can ignore.

Fear lights up a central part of our brains and brings the senses, the memory and the whole body to full alert. And it’s uncomfortable, like a blaring alarm.

So new situations, and standing out from the crowd, trigger off a reaction that repels us. How is it that anyone ever does anything amazing?

Fear can be reinterpreted

I’ve told the story before of driving through Sydney (an unfamiliar city to me) in a rental car, on my way to the airport, and being directed by the airport signs into the very deep harbour tunnel that they have there now. That thing just keeps on going down, and I was thinking about how much water was above me, and imagining what would happen if it leaked. It was a new experience, plus I had a degree of anxiety about whether I would get there in time for my flight. I started to feel that tremble in my gut that signals fear.

I decided, though, that what I was feeling was going to get the label “excitement”. I was on an adventure.

See, the thing about fear is that it tunes up your perceptions and heightens your experience and the memorability of that experience. People differ in how much they enjoy this. If you’re someone who naturally has a low level of activation in your brain, that lift is great, and you’ll actively seek it out. Someone like me, an introvert who already has a high level of brain activation, may find it too much and want to avoid it.

But as in my Sydney Harbour Tunnel experience, you can choose to enjoy it. As with so much else, resistance or acceptance plays a big role. I’ll talk more about this in a later post, but basically by accepting the experience and being open to it, I reduced the unpleasantness of it. Partly, I’m sure, this was because I was now paying attention to it, which was what my brain was setting out to achieve, so it didn’t have to try so hard any more.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

A friend of mine changed his life dramatically after reading the book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. Every day, he would do something that frightened him a little. (My colleague Vlad Dolezal is doing this at the moment with his Random Acts of Courage experiment.)

An interesting thing happens when you do this. Since fear often comes largely from the unknown, going ahead and doing the thing anyway reduces the amount of unknown territory that exists for you – and so reduces the number of things you’re afraid of.

When I was training as a hypnotherapist, for example, I remember in the first week we all felt apprehensive at the idea of doing an induction with someone. What if it didn’t work? But by the second week, inductions were nothing. Not a one of us felt any anxiety about them at all – because we’d practiced them repeatedly and successfully.

The circle of courage and the circle of fear

Doing things that frighten you just a bit enlarges your circle of courage.

I’ve been growing my circle of courage by doing improv classes (something that definitely scared me). At the start of each class, we warm up with a game where you pass imaginary energy around a circle by making eye contact with your fellow players.

Guess what? When I’m walking along and I see someone I don’t know, I don’t avoid eye contact like I used to  (and that’s made me aware of how much I used to avoid it). Because eye contact is familiar now. It’s not scary.

If you have a bigger circle of courage than the people around you (or even one that’s the same size, but includes different things that they’re still scared of), then they will start to regard you as amazing.

On the other hand, avoiding things that frighten you just a bit enlarges your circle of fear. Your brain is very good at pattern-matching. It can make faces out of clouds, conspiracies out of coincidences and elaborate stories out of watching two people on a park bench. So when it sees something that looks a bit like the thing you avoided because you were afraid, it adds it to the “be afraid of” list.

You grow more and more fearful, until you finally do something you’re afraid of because it’s important enough to you to not let the fear win. This is why people come to me for help with phobias.

Action Now

Write down one thing that you could do today but that you’re a bit afraid of. Not terrified, just a bit afraid or nervous. Often, things in this category are to do with other people and risking their disapproval, but it could be a small physical challenge too.

Now, thinking as rationally as you can, write down the worst thing that could happen if you go ahead and do that thing.

Reflect on how likely that event is. If doing the thing would actually be dangerous, pick something else. This isn’t about courting danger, it’s about overcoming fear of the relatively harmless.

Now – you knew this was coming, didn’t you? Go and do it. Don’t let the fear win.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life. If you need more resources to help you with fear, take a look at my free course, Simple Stress Management Techniques.