Why Facing Your Fears Doesn't Work

Most of the advice out there about facing your fears, overcome your fear, get outside your comfort zone, and eventually all your self-doubt will go away, you'll feel totally confident and crush it in life— that advice is actually wrong. In fact, have you ever pushed through? You spoke up in the meeting, you did the bold thing, you took that next step in your career, you went for that thing in dating, and afterwards, even if it went well, do you feel proud and excited and liberated, or do you feel more relieved? And then also, when the next time rolls around, the next meeting, the next date, the next whatever, are you confident going into it? Do you feel like, well, face my fear and now it's gonna crush it this time? Or is the doubt there again? Do you question yourself? Do you feel nervous ahead of time? Is it another moment of getting through it? And if so, you're not alone. This is the most common pattern that I help people with when it comes to building confidence. It's what I got stuck in for many years, and it comes from some of the faulty advice out there, which is pointing us in a useful direction, but it's leaving us without some of the essential keys to really build confidence, set yourself free, and be authentically you, and know how to bring that confidence to the next moment, to the next meeting. Because confidence retroactively is kind of useless, right? To be like, I look back at that meeting and I feel pretty good about it. That's good, it's great. But what about the next one? What about the next day of your life? If you're chronically stressed or worried about it, are you really free? Do you get to enjoy that confidence? And so what I find often happens is we get that advice: life begins at the end of your comfort zone, do what scares you, challenge your fears. And look, this is advice that I've given people over the years because it is useful step in the process. We have to take bold action to build our confidence. But if we are missing a key ingredient, it can never work. And that's why I've seen with many clients that I talk to, they're high-powered, they're professionals, they've been in a field for 10, 20 years. I talk to physicians, leaders, teachers, therapists, people who are like highly skilled at what they're doing. They've been doing it for years. They have degrees, they have decades under their belt, and they're still, "No, I don't think I can do this. Oh, underneath I'm not enough yet. Oh, what do people think? Oh." They're still in that doubt and insecurity. It's hidden. And they might call word for it. They say it's imposter syndrome, but naming that doesn't stop it. And a lot of people that I know just settle, like, that's kind of how it's going to be. I have to just sort of push through that. And that's exactly what the problem is. They're pushing through. They learned to perform without actually being free. They push through and they're doing something that I call endurance mode. I'm afraid, I'm going to get through it. It's like a grit, courage, will thing. Again, courage is a useful muscle or skill to build, but if that's all we got, we don't unlock true freedom and experience a different mode, which I'll talk about in a minute. But let's get back to that endurance mode. Why is that happening? And why does the system not update? Isn't that the promise of all doing what scares you or exposure? Is you do the thing and then eventually it becomes easier and you're no longer afraid anymore? Sometimes, but often not. Why? Because people think that the exposure is like a mechanical guaranteed process. I do the thing X times, 5 times, 10 times, 15 times, 20 times, and then I'm confident after that because that's how it's framed. That's how it's taught. But actually, those repetitions repetitions aren't automatically changing something in your mind and in your body. They might, but they very well might not. And there's a missing ingredient. The purpose of the exposures is to invite something to happen. And if this something doesn't happen, all the exposure in the world won't work. But what's supposed to happen? To know that, you have to know why you're afraid in the first place. Why are you nervous before that meeting, before that date, before any situation where there's uncertainty about how it's going to go? Why don't we feel happy? Why don't we feel excited. Sometimes we do, but often we feel more nervous and dread. And that's because on some level we're like, I don't know how this is gonna go. And if it goes badly, quote unquote, which is what? They're not gonna like me. I'm gonna forget what I was supposed to say. People are going to look down on me. I'm going to mess it up. It's not going to go well. We all have specific details for that situation we're going into. But if that happens, it's awful. And it's not just I'm not going to get what I want, person's not going to want to date me, they're not going to hire me, that's not gonna— I'm gonna lose face. But also, I, my worth, my sense of being okay, loving myself, being okay in my body, feeling like I have a right to be happy today, is all going to go away. So there is a lot riding on that, and that's what endurance mode is. Let me get— let me do it. Okay, phew, I made it through. I didn't mess it up. But we didn't necessarily get the actual learning. So what is the actual learning? That is, oh, messing up, being imperfect is not dangerous. Being who I really am in this situation, whatever that is, the charming me or the slightly awkward me, knowing Knowing exactly what to say, not knowing what to say, being funny on the date versus being a little stiff or uncomfortable on the date. It's all okay. It's safe either way. I'm okay either way. That is the key unlock. That's what must get learned through the exposures, through the doing what scares you. And if that's never learned, then we're afraid forever. We become a high-performing, anxiety-ridden, successful person, which is a lot of people. We hide it really well. No one reveals that except for maybe to one close friend. Maybe not. Maybe you reveal it to ChatGPT. ChatGPT, I'm going to tell you something. And then it says, I see you, you're a good person. You're like, thanks, robot. I don't know if that totally worked, but that felt good to hear. And that's part of the problem. We don't want to reveal ourselves to other humans, which is part of how we free ourselves, by the way, is we see, oh, I'm okay either way. This person still loves me either way. But in that situation, we do what scares us and we get through it. And then we realize, oh, I'm okay. And this is where if you hyper-prepare, if you polish everything you're going to say, if you have your set routines for the date, the stories you know you're going to tell because you told them a bunch, which by the way, I have to reference The Night at the Roxbury. This is an old one, this is dating myself. This was an SNL skit that they turned into a movie. Will Ferrell and some other funny guy from SNL, they're these two kind of losers, I guess you'd say, who go to clubs a lot and try to pick up on the ladies and they're not very good at it. And they always are telling the same rehashed stories. And one of their prime top shelf stories they pull out to impress the ladies is this one time they met a celebrity. And the celebrity that they met was Emilio Estevez, which is the star of The Mighty Ducks. Again, these are a bunch of '90s references that you might not have any awareness of, The canned stories, to cut to the chase, don't work for them, and they're probably not going to work great for you. Not because they're not impressive, and you might polish your presentation until it's awesome and you deliver it so well. And I talk to a lot of people who are actually very skillful. They can talk to a room of people. They can even be charming with people, but they're anxious inside. They're stressed. They're thinking about it for days ahead of time. They're worrying about it even though they've done it a million times. And then it gets even more confusing to them because they're like, wait a minute, I know when I get on that stage, or I know when I go do this surgery, I know when I go talk to this person, it's going to be fine. I've done it 50 times. So why am I losing sleep over it 2 weeks ahead of time? Why am I stressing so much about it? Because they've done the exposure, they did the scary thing, but they didn't learn. In fact, their preparation, their overpreparation made it worse because yes, they got through it. They did it in endurance mode and they felt the relief afterwards, but they didn't learn. I can just do this thing as me. I can just be me when I go give this talk. It's in me. The skills are in me. The communication ability is in me. Me sharing whatever my gifts are, whether it's a surgeon's fingers or the words that come out of your mouth or your humor, and on a date, whatever it is, me being me is great and it's okay, and I'll be okay no matter what happens, the result of me being me. And so we don't learn that. We perform our way through it, we grit our teeth, we get through it, and then we have to do it again, and we're proving it every single time, and we don't get to install the new identity update. We're like, wait a minute, I am the kind of person who's actually quite charming. Wait a minute, I actually am a I'm a super skilled doctor. Of course I can handle this situation. And we know that on one level intellectually, but we don't get it emotionally because we never let ourselves fully see, hey, I did that. So what's the solution here? You're saying, should I stop doing the actions? No, we do the action, but we have to do it as ourselves. We have to do it imperfectly. You have to take the risk to be real in that situation and go through the discomfort of that. It's more uncomfortable than just doing it in performance and endurance mode. So I'm gonna give you a very specific practical example so this isn't theoretical. These are from two different clients that I worked with. One was doing a lot of public speaking, had a lifetime fear of that, and was doing some Toastmasters, which is like a public speaking club if you're not familiar with that, on the side with our work, and using that as a place to do exposure. And she got really good at giving polished speeches, anxious as hell every time before, did 10, 15, 20 exposures. Why isn't it working? Because her fear was not just getting in front of the group. Her fear was that anxiety was shameful. If people really saw that I was anxious, it would be over. I'm not okay if people see that. So her polished speaking never solved that fear. Do you see that? And so what was recommendation for her. My recommendation was to not give a polished speech, to give an impromptu speech where you probably would mess up. And if you really want to set yourself free, that's what I told her, fast as possible, you actually, when you're feeling nervous in the moment with your Toastmasters club there, you let people know at the beginning of your talk, wow, I'm nervous right now. And her eyes got real wide and was like, you can't, you can't do that, that's embarrassing, that's awful. That's all her stories coming out. I was like, are you sure you can't do that? Well, yeah, you can't do that. I was like, you know, I told her a story back when I was in my training, I was finishing my doctorate and I was doing an internship and a practicum postdoc at a college campus. And when I got into the interviews to see which place I was going to get positioned at, you know, one place was Portland, Oregon, where I ended up. One place was in LA, one place was in Hawaii. And you go interview all these places and then you put your vote in and they vote on you. And you find out one email on like at 6 AM on a Thursday morning, where am I going to live next year? And turns out it was Portland, Oregon. So I went there. When I was doing the interviews, they asked me like, what are you interested in, you know, anything beyond the clinical work with people? And I was like, yeah, I wanted to give public presentations and share with the student body. And they're like, "Wow, impressive." And inside I was like, "I'm so terrified of that." That's why I said that. I threw my hat over the fence. Like, have you heard that saying? What's the best way to make sure you get over the fence? Throw your hat over first and then you're going to climb over and get it. I committed myself to be in a situation where I would need to give more public talks. And it was interesting. One of the first ones they gave me when I got there was one on test anxiety. So a lot of students who had a lot of anxiety about taking tests, very common in college campuses and smart kids, they know their stuff, but then comes the test and they have anxiety and it really makes it hard to think and perform well, right? So I was going to give a talk to this group of students, about 60, 70 of them in this room. I knew what I wanted to say. I had some great tips I think would really help them. I looked at the standard curriculum that had been taught for a long time and I was like, I can make this better because I had so much experience with anxiety in my life. And I think I made a really good presentation. And then I got up in front of the room and I knew at that point I was not comfortable speaking in front of groups. That's why I signed up for it. And so the beginning of the talk, I said, all right, I have a question for you all before I get into the content, which is test anxiety. On a scale of 1 to 10, how nervous do you think I am right now? And people said stuff. Usually the answers were low numbers: 2, 1, 0, 3. And I was like, um, I'm about an 8 right now out of 10. And their eyes got wide and their jaw dropped because what I was demonstrating to them was exactly what I was going to teach them about test anxiety, which is that you can do you and there can be anxiety present. And that the more we need to hide the anxiety or fix the anxiety or get rid of the anxiety— now I can't focus on the test because I'm like, I'm so anxious. I gotta get rid of this anxiety, and I gotta— and instead of taking the test, I'm battling the anxiety. And same thing when it comes to speaking in the group. And it did two things. One, it showed them that you can perform, you can share, you can create, you can do, you can be smart even if there's anxiety moving through, as long as you let it rise and fall. And I was also on a profound level healing my own shame about being seen as anxious. I told that whole story to this client. She said, wow, that sounds awful. And that is when you know you're on track, because it's the most creepy crawly, like, oh my God, I can't show that. Oh my God, I can't share that in my relationship. Oh Oh my God, people can't see this about me. But that, my friend, is the ticket price to authentic confidence, to a life of freedom and true lasting confidence. And that is when you get to unlock— no longer endurance mode— you get to unlock enjoyment mode. Just imagine there's two little toggles, right? You know, you have toggles in the settings on your phone where you press it and it slides over, right? You're going to turn off endurance mode and turn on enjoyment mode. Do you want to turn on enjoyment mode? Actually enjoy yourself when you're giving the talk, actually enjoy yourself on the date, actually enjoy yourself when you're a doctor doing the surgery, whatever it is, you can be in a state of flow. You could be a state of enjoyment, life moving through, having fun. This is it right now. This is your life today, this week. This is what's happening. And so many people who are facing their fears and succeeding, they're getting through their life, and it's only when it's too late they look back and they say, geez, why did I have to be so scared all the time? And this is the reason, because we're unwilling to really show up as ourselves. So that's my invitation for you. If you want to unlock unlock way more freedom, confidence, and a sense of trust and faith in yourself and in life that the next thing you can handle, you'll be okay no matter what. It involves not just getting through it. It involves bringing your full self to that next moment as you are in your imperfections and taking that risk to be real and seeing what extraordinary unlocks as a result.