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you know what's up this is Leo for actualise org and today I want to talk about the issue of fear and how fear can be holding you back from really achieving a lot of the success that you might want in your health career relationships its etc areas in your life and some ways to reduce fear in fact one really good technique for this that I found is by simply asking the question what's the worst that could happen so I asked you what is the worst that can happen of the thing that you fear most if you dig into this what you'll tend to find is that the worst-case scenario is really not as bad as you make it out to be or that it's not as a it's not as likely to happen so you make it out to be or that really that that underlying fear that you have is rooted in something even deeper and even deeper fear that pervades everything that you do in your life and finding that and then working on that and sorting out the inner demons around that really deep-rooted fear is I think one of the best self-development things you can do for yourself because it will unblock a lot of a lot of obstacles for you in your life because how you do one thing tends to be how you do another thing because it's all motivated from someplace deeper within so what are the key questions that uh that you should ask yourself when you're feel about something for me fear comes up when I have to make decisions for example one one really big decision I had to make lately was moving here to Vegas right now I'm sitting in a little park area outside my outside my apartment in Vegas and where I live now but I used to live in Dallas and I made that transition just earlier this year and for me is a really big really big shift in my direction in my life and what I was doing and also pretty substantial move across the country was like 1,200 miles from Dallas to Vegas I have to move every being over my family was back in Dallas girlfriend was back in Dallas uh friends were back in Dallas and I really had nothing nothing that I knew here in Vegas I was moving to someplace that was fresh and kind of a clean slate for me so for me that was a really tough decision in fact at that point I was still going through my coach training and interestingly enough I had a coach that I was working with through the training process and one of the issues that I discussed with him was was this Vegas decision it was tricky because you know obviously we did all the kind of standard stuff making lists of pros and cons of why to stay why to go but in the end no matter how much I thought about it I thought about it a lot it knows I was very diligent about the whole thing I didn't I did the right research about all the costs and everything like that and I had the I had stayed a month in Vegas the prior year so I was kind of familiar with what I was getting myself into but even after all that logical analysis I was still feeling very I had a palpable feeling of fear about moving here and about how how much was at stake and whether I would really regret moving here maybe if I would have to move back if something would go wrong and if this was a direction I want to take in my life this was a pretty bold and radical move even though I've made moves like that before I've been in California Boston Dallas so I've been around but I want to briefly kind of use this as a point to illustrate the thinking process that goes around goes into uncovering your true fears because a lot of times what you think you're fearing what you're fearful of is not really the route fear underlying everything so with this with this Vegas example we kind of went along these lines and I have I have the dialogue somewhat translated directly in the article below so you can go ahead and read that for all the details but the gist of it I'm going to go through here was something like this is that the key tool that you use to find out what your fear is is to ask what's the worst that can happen and then when the person answers that question then you asked them and why is that so bad now these are some very simple two very simple tools very simple questions that could be asked and it's easy to get the strong by not digging deep enough so I want to show you how it worked in my case when I was moving to Vegas and I brought this issue up with my coach you know he asked he would ask me okay so so what what are you really afraid of what's the worst that can happen and and I would say something like well I'm gonna move to Vegas and I'm really gonna hate it and and then he would say okay and and why is that going to be bad what's so bad about hating moving to Vegas and I would say something like well I've made moves before I've moved from California to Boston didn't really like that move didn't didn't have friends there felt kind of lonely because I was away from my family and just didn't really like the weather up there so all sorts of circumstances I basically put myself in an environment that I didn't really like and that was frustrating and and painful to some degree and so he said okay I hear you say that and what was so what's so bad about living in a place you don't like and then I really kind of thought about and I said well it's really bad about that is that I ultimately I have to start planning to move out of it like I want you know I want a stable place to live and I have to now I have to plan somewhere else to move so there's certain like instability there it says okay well what's so bad about living in a place where you don't feel comfortable and you said that the worst thing about it is moving out granted now what's so bad about having to make plans to move somewhere else I said well there's a lot of hassle involved a lot of a lot of energy wasted a lot of a lot of time wasted money wasted resources wasted that I could put to better use okay and so he says and so what's bad about wasting your resources and I thought about that I said well what's bad about wasting my resources is I kind of view my time as precious and my money I only have so much money and what I really want to do is is kind of settle down and really focus on on my career and focus on being productive rather than diverting my energy my attention away to moving here or doing that or doing this which is ultimately not significantly what I'm when I'm chasing after I want my career to be good and I want my job to be good and I want to accomplish good things I don't want to be successful he says okay so what's so bad about not being successful and not being able to to put those resources towards your career and and I thought about that and I said well ultimately if I don't put my my energy if I don't put energy into my career I mean I only have so much time my life ultimately is pretty short at least I tend to think of it that way and I have only lived at a time on this earth to accomplish what I want to accomplish to set to set out and make a difference the kind of difference that I'm proud of the kind of difference that I want to make so that I'm proud of my life and he said okay and what's so bad about about not being able to make that difference and not being able to to be proud of your life and and I thought about that and I said well well that's that's probably the most important thing to me is to live what I think is a meaningful life and to make some sort of positive contribution that I'm that I'm happy with some sort of creative contribution where I don't just live a life and then die with regrets and not having done anything anything amazing in it and not having contributed to it somehow in a creative way in a productive way and and that was it right there you know that was at that point we kind of hit rock bottom and we hit the underlying here and see what happened there as we went through this process just asking the simple question and what's so bad about that and what's so bad about this and what's so bad about that what's so bad about this and ultimately what you get to is you get to something very deep and in my case it was really a fear not of moving it was more fear of of being of wasting my resources which ultimately meant you know why was I afraid of wasting my resources well that means I wouldn't have those resources to use towards being productive and creative and if I wasn't doing that then ultimately my life would be meaningless it's kind of struck to put it like that right you don't tend to think of it like that but that's really how your brain is functioning you just never have articulated it at least I hadn't really articulated that before and so that's powerful to figure that out because I can definitely see how that is a pattern through everything that I do I'm very a kind of career motivated and work motivated I started my own businesses various projects and websites and I've done that because I've always been looking for that thing where I can make meaningful contribution and something that I enjoy both doing and then having that that creative output be enjoyed by other people or be useful to them in some way so that's cot that was kind of the route fear that I had and my route fear was that if I moved to Vegas that I'm gonna waste my resources and then I'm not gonna I'm not gonna be successful and I'm not gonna be proud of my life ultimately if it goes if it all goes bad of course working with a good coach the coach will start to reframe some of these things and when I ultimately realized with this discussion about Vegas was that the reason I made the decision to move here or started considering that decision in the first place was because I saw it as a great opportunity for myself because I was in live involved with the nightlife scene and I really I really spent a lot of time over the last year going out hitting of bars and clubs doing a lot of socializing and building up my social skills um that's something that I was that I came from kind of deficient background in that from from high school college and so I'm kind of making up for it now and really boosting up my social skills by going out there every night and practicing this stuff a lot and Vegas was a great opportunity or great place to do that maybe one of the best places in the country just because you know it is Sin City it's a party town this is this is where you can go any day any night of the week and find something fun to do out at night which is challenging in in other cities and can be challenging in Dallas Dallas is very very widespread big sprawling metropolis and so to me basically Vegas was this opportunity and with with this coach I realized that ultimately I was making it as considering the decision moved to Vegas because of the opportunity that was there for me and what's the worst that could happen well the worst that could happen ultimately is that I move here I don't like it and then I have to move back and sure there's there's this hassle a little bit of waste of energy in productivity to do this move both to and away from Vegas if I don't like it but ultimately the raw cost of that is it's not as great as I made it out my mind the rock cost is maybe if week of moving to Vegas a week of moving away from Vegas and those those couple of weeks lost in terms of time but then of course the cost of moving it cost me about 4 grand to move to Vegas cuz I had to pay some lease breaking fees to my apartment and then it would cost me to about 2 grand I calculated to move back out of Vegas to Dallas and so total that's six grand and when I really thought about that I thought about in that light and I said well you know what what am i doing if I move here I have a lease term for at least a year so I have to stay to make us for a year that's fine and I'm going to lose two weeks of my time moving plus I'm going to pay 6 grand potentially on this endeavor and when I kind of stacked when I stock when I stacked the scales like that I saw that moving to Vegas was actually an amazingly cheap opportunity for me so for six grand and and some hassle sometime of moving I basically got to live in Vegas for at least a year to me when I put it in those words sorta thinking about like that it really made a lot of sense and I thought and I said that you know that's that's an opportunity that I have to seize upon and that I shouldn't be too worried about it going wrong because if it does go wrong at the very least you know I would tell myself that I paid six grand just to have the experience of living in a new city in Vegas and getting to know some people here getting to know the nightlife here just partaking of it all and even if I had to move back to Dallas well those are still really valuable life experiences that I feel I would have grown from and they would have been worth much more to me and want it over the load the course of my life than six thousand bucks and two weeks of my time so once I started seeing it that way would help my coach then decision really became very clear and a lot of that fear fear subsided so the lesson from all this is to really dig into your fears and try to ask yourself what the worst-case scenarios are for you the trick here is to really dig deep it's not enough to just to ask yourself what is the worst-case scenario and then you come up with it and then to ask yourself well why is that bad and then you you answer it with some sort of vague abstract like pseudo feeling well that would suck that would suck well well you really what you really want to do when you're doing this and you can do this as an exercise by yourself you don't need a coach per se for it is you can sit down and whether you're facing a big decision that you're afraid to make or you have some other fear that's there you know really ask yourself what's the worst-case scenario here and write it out write it on a piece of paper what's the worst case scenario you can imagine and after you do that ask yourself so what so what's really what's really horrible about that and your mind is going to come up with some sort of generic initial answer and what you're gonna want to do is you're going to want to persist then you're going to want to say okay well I hear that and then say and then ask the question just simply again what's so bad about that thing and then your mind will help with a slightly more specific answer and and then you're gonna say okay and what's so bad about that and what's so bad about the next thing and what's so bad about the next thing and what's so bad about the next thing and eventually you're going to get down if you keep digging you're going to get kind of hit a rock bottom where you get to this point where you hit upon something that's very core to you that is that you feel is like a part of your identity that's something you can't really live without like for me so this is very core to me is is to have achievement in my life and to to be creative in a positive way like for me if I if you take that out of life that really Rob's me of almost all the meaning of life so for me that's something personally that is very important to me and so I'm driven by by two sides of this coin the one side is that I'm afraid of of living an insignificant life and having no achievement in it and basically being a failure and and then on the other hand that's the negative motivation on this on this other hand the positive motivation is that I'm really motivated to be productive and be creative and to just to generate value for other people without specifically just like wanting wanting stuff in return and so that can be very positive thing so those are two sides of the same coin this coin of productivity and and meaningfulness in life or finding that and needing it and so that's I definitely have got a firm sense of what that is for me what my root motivation is and so my question is what is that for you what is really the driver in your life whether it's positive or negative shazar there's probably facets of both of these most likely more negative than positive unless you've done a lot of self development work and you really kind of mature so so some common root fears I actually got a list here because I wanted to make sure I get them well these are ones that are just common across the board they're very generic and kind of abstract and they actually manifest themselves in in so many different ways well one of them for sure is fear of being of being insignificant or having a meaningless life just finding meaning in life is important for people fear that you are unlovable fear that you're not good enough or smart enough fear of going broke fear of rejection by others fear of embarrassment in front of others fear of failure and maybe fear of failure in the in the eyes of others not only in your own eyes fear of reverting to your old self so maybe there's some some some progress that you've made recently in your personal development and and you've got that deep fear of RHIB AK sliding and reverting back into it even though you've been doing pretty good lately so fear of that fear of well maybe even fear of success because of the kind of burdens that success would put on you that can be a very very pernicious limiting fear or limiting belief that you can have is to is to worry about all the all the problems that come with being successful whether it's having more money or having more friends or being more popular having more prestige that sort of stuff so these are these are some common root fears maybe already you're getting some ideas about which of these you tend to gravitate towards and if you're not if you if you're kind of unclear then take a look at what you're feel fearful of in your life and really dig down into it chances are that if you have if you have if you have significant fear around anything in your life in different areas those if you dig if you dig and trace those back down they're all going to trace back down to something some sort of underlying underlying motivations underlying structures and anxieties that you have and so a great way to do that that digging process is with the question of what's the worst that can happen and why is that so bad and also another one that I like is what will what will I do when the worst does happen all right that is a good way to take a little bit of pressure off in fact since we're on that topic really the whole point of digging into your fears is to to move forward and to be successful and productive in the kind of way that you want to be so that you're not blocked or limited and the best ways to do that I found well actually the very best way I think is just to take action if you take action against your fear the fear just kind of tends to melt away and dissipate a lot of your fears are are very very illusory very self deceptive coming from that negative side of you that lower self of you that wants security and comfort and if you just if you just brute force your way through it with action a lot of times that will do the trick and that will eliminate the fear whatever you're afraid of if you're afraid of public speaking go up there give a speech great way to reduce public speaking if you're afraid of going through a job interview process go and apply to ten different jobs and go through the process ten times you'll find that by the tenth time the fears going to be gone if you're afraid of if you're afraid of being poor not that I really recommend this but you could actually try to be poor and see what that feels like and you'll probably notice that it's not so bad it's not the worst thing that can happen in your life and that a lot of your fears are simply exaggerations or flat-out falsehoods that are coming from some part of you that isn't is it very conscious now when you face when you face your fears there's 10 there tends to be or what I found like 5 different ways that this that this this process can play itself out one way is that you just refuse to face your fears which is basically you know you you give up on on the whole process and when you refuse to face your fears you kind of just stick your head in the sand you don't want to hear what other people are telling you you don't want to you don't want to hear what what reality is telling you so if you're suffering this usually there's a long string of suffering in your life it's usually because well you're hitting your head against the wall and reality is telling you one thing and you're being stubborn you're being a stubborn jackass and you don't want to recognize what reality is telling you reality something they got a change you're going to change your situation you got to change what you're doing at a change your behavior to change your mindset whatever that might be and and so if you refuse to to take on that that message then you're going to suffer more and more and your fears are you going to just going to fester and basically that's the strategy of sticking your head in the sand right like an ostrich so that's not the way you want to go the second way when you face your fears what happens is if you're facing your fears you're gonna realize that they're exaggerated like we talked about so you might be over blowing and catastrophizing how bad it would be to be poor or you might be blown over blowing how bad it would be to miss one day at the gym or you might be over blowing how bad it would be if you got a bad review at work or how bad it would be if you snubbed one of your friends right chances are that you're building that up for yourself and you're turning it into this massive catastrophe like your wife would be ruined if this happened and in most cases that's just not true even in very serious cases like I'm talking about serious fears like fear of losing your business if you're losing your money all your money in the stock market fear of maybe a child dying one of your kids dying fear of of losing a spouse fear of losing your parents these are these are like really serious serious life circumstances invited by no means am i saying that they're not they're not legitimate but it's still the case that if you're living your life fearing those things you're living in a very disempowering way you're probably not getting awesome results in your life and even if you are getting great results you could be getting much better results if you eliminate those fears that you'd be free to act in an empowering way in a positive way and you'd also feel better about yourself so the exaggeration happens the the third thing that happens is a lot of times that worst case there that you can that you come up with is highly improbable so even though it might happen it's very very very unlikely so you know when I was moving to Vegas um I could come up with all sorts of worst-case scenarios like well worst-case scenario is that like I moved to Vegas and Vegas gets attacked by terrorists while I'm here or some stupid thing like that um sure I mean granted yeah that could happen under the hand that could also happen in Dallas in theory so that kind of worst-case scenario is all the likely highly probable and not a good way to base your your life decisions around that kind of stuff so that kind of stuff you just have to ignore and do the best you can with the stuff that's likely to happen it's much more likely that I'll move to Vegas and have an awesome time here learn a lot and be really happy then it is that I'll move here and get attacked by terrorists right um the more likely worst-case scenario for me would have been that I just moved here I didn't really feel feel like I fit in with the crowd I didn't really do my my socializing stuff maybe I wouldn't have been able to establish the business that I wanted to establish here and then I would have to move back that's kind of a realistic worst-case scenario whereas the terrorists worst case near that's like a highly catastrophize exaggerated worst-case scenario and also very probable now when you're digging into fears the other thing you might find the fourth thing you might find is that when you're digging into them is that the fear that you thought you had is not the true fear is that it's like a surface fear that's underlying something that's that's sitting on top of something much bigger and so that's where that process comes into bigging into it seeing really what the root fear is and then fifthly once you once you kind of come face-to-face with your fear and you see it for what it is and maybe you even recognize that this is a legitimate fear like maybe maybe you're at work and there's a little legitimate chance that you're going to get laid off in the next few weeks because the company is going bankrupt you know that sounds like something that's mostly out of your control if you're just an employee and the something that you just have to kind of accept whether it's going to happen or not and in that case you could go about those two weeks and the rest of your life while you're still at that job really fearful about it and what that's going to do is it's going to tend to disempower you so you're going to take stupid this you're gonna make stupid decisions you're going to make bad actions you're going to behave in a way that's actually probably going to lead to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy effect or at the very least it's not going to finally lead to good performance at work or you could just recognize that you know what I do have this fear it might be even legitimate there's a chance that it will happen but how do I want to proceed from here do I want to proceed in an empowering way or or do I want to proceed in a kind of a victimized hopeless mindset that comes with with always being fearful and if you want to get the best performance out of yourself then always the empowering way is the best way to go and also makes you feel feel good to be empowered rather than always anxious and worried about worst-case scenarios and all that nonsense so about worst-case scenarios there's just kind of a caveat that I want to make about this and that that is that it really helps do this exercise this whole digging in and asking yourself what's the worst that can happen and what's so bad about that helps to do that by yourself if you're in a very kind of high consciousness state in a relatively empowered state and not in a in a desperate emotionally weak low willpower low consciousness kind of state because if you tend to be a like or if you tend to be a habitually negative thinker then and I ask you or you ask yourself what's the worst thing that could happen you're going to tend to dig a hole that you can't dig your way out of it's almost like if you're going to use these tools you go balls to the wall and use them full-on like a hundred percent use them to get to the bottom of your fear if you use them half-ass you go only a little bit if you like dip your toe in the in the pool what's going to happen is you're gonna make yourself feel worse you're gonna ask yourself what's the worst-case scenario gonna come up with something that's that's very unlikely and irrational and then that's just going to make you feel bad and you're not going to be able to kind of prop yourself out that's why I have it a coach sometimes helps when you're doing this because the coach is objective and they're not connected to it they can always pop you out and they can be careful to watch out for that kind of negative thinking and challenge you on some of those limiting beliefs that you have and assumptions that you have that might be holding you back if you do attempt to do this yourself just be aware that if you do have kind of a pattern of thinking negatively you might want to avoid this entirely or do it at a point where you're feeling stronger and make sure you dig all the way so you get the full benefit of finding out what your root beers are it's a tricky process because it's easier to stick your head in the sand right it's always more convenient to stick your head in the sand and never address your fears and if you do that that's like putting a band-aid over a broken leg it you know am I it might even stop the bleeding for a little bit and it might make it kind of look better and mask the fact that there's a bone sticking out of it or whatever but in the end it's not the best approach and what we're all about here with actualize that org is how to get you sustainable long-term success in whatever part of your life that you want it in and also fulfillment and good feeling the best way to do that is to spend your time digging to your fears even if it's painful so that you can you can release that pressure off of yourself and you'll find that when you're doing these exercises at first it might be kind of challenging but as soon as you really look into that fear you're going to find that it's not as menacing as you thought it was and that the fear of the fear was worse than the actuality of the fear coming about so I encourage you to add to ask yourself what you fear the most right now in your life and go through and dig into it and see if you can get to the bottom of it so that you can start to release some of that suffering and start to live a more in a more empowered way and feel much better about yourself you