How to TRANSFORM Fear into Fuel | 13 Minutes

Turn fear on itself.

Feel fear quite strongly.

Fear is the fuel.

Undoes the fear.

I grandiose my way out of fear.

Fear.

Embrace that fear.

Transcend that fear.

Hello, Believe Nation. My name is Evan Carmichael. My one word is believe, and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve all of the world's major challenges. And so to help you on your mission today, we're going to learn how you can overcome your fear. And as always, guys, as you're watching the video, if something really speaks to you, please leave it down in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired. And when you write it down, it's much more likely to stick for yourself as well. Enjoy!

The only way to deal with fear that I found in my life is a couple of ways. One of those ways is to turn it on itself and ask yourself, what am I afraid of? I'm afraid of that? I gotta be more afraid of what I'm gonna miss out on, missing out on my mission, missing out on who I'm supposed to be. In other words, if you're not gonna get rid of fear, then use fear. Use fear or it uses you. It's that simple. So you gotta say, okay, what's the price if I just stay doing this? What's the price? What do I need to really get scared if I learn all this and I don't follow through? That's something to be scared about. And then that fear will get you over your fear. It'll push you through. Turn fear on itself. Second way you can do it is use what you've probably heard me say because I've used it since I was 17, is my little rocking chair test, right? I'm gonna sit myself in my rocking chair and I'm 85 years old and looking back on my life and I say, I didn't do this or I did.

You are unusually fearless and willing to go in the face of other people telling you something is crazy. And I know a lot of pretty crazy people, you still stand out. Where does that come from, or how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea? Or where do you get the internal strength to do that?

Well, first of all, I'd say I actually think I feel fear quite strongly. So it's not as though I just have the absence of fear, I feel it quite strongly. But there are just times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of fear.

So speaking of important things—

Like, people shouldn't think, I, I, I should— people shouldn't think, well, I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn't do it. It's normal to feel fear. Like, you'd have to definitely do something mentally wrong if you didn't feel fear.

So you just feel it and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway?

Yeah. You know, actually something that can be helpful is fatalism to some degree. If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear. So when starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10%, and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose lose everything, but that maybe we would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward. Even if we died, maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward. So that would still do some good. Yeah, same with Tesla. I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low.

There's always fear, and I even put it in Rocky 3 that, you know, he's, I'm afraid, I'm afraid. The fear is— but the fear is the fuel that we use for overachievement. If I wasn't afraid at times, I wouldn't work as hard. And because the fear is I don't want to slip back into mediocrity. I don't want to just say, okay, I want to rest on my laurels. So I'm— I hear footsteps all the time, and I know that I only have a certain amount of time, and I don't want to waste it because it's gone so quickly. I mean, since Rocky, it's been almost 7 and a half, 8 years. And I think that Dolly and I are just overachievers because we know that there's only a certain amount of productivity in a day, and we don't waste it. I'm a writer. I'm supposed to be behind the scenes.

And everybody else is supposed to be in front of the stuff.

Now she's finally in front of the cameras, the famously private woman talking about her epic struggles with anxiety and her fear of public speaking. What physiologically happens when you're having that stage 4 panic attack?

There's a little bit of panicked breathing. There's a lot of pacing back and forth and mumbling to myself.

Despite being invited to every glamorous party in Hollywood, she'd make excuses, saying she was just too busy, until one day her sister provoked her.

I was sort of going on and on and on about, like, all of the invitations the invitations that I had received. And my sister finally sort of cut in and said, "Are you gonna say yes to any of these things?" And I remember being very taken aback and saying, "No, I'm busy. I can't." And her sort of looking at me like, "That's insane." And at some point just saying, "You never say yes to anything." And those words really sticking with me, because she was right.

And so this became a campaign to say yes to the things that scared you.

Yeah, to say yes to things that freaked me out.

And when you started saying yes, started to happen.

It's the doing of the thing that sort of undoes the fear.

When you experience moments of self-doubt, how do you approach getting out of that dark place?

Good question.

I grandiose my way out of fear. If you can imagine that. It's a good way.

You know, I literally—

It's charming.

It's like, literally, it's like, okay, I'm gonna do one of the greatest car chases of all time. And if I don't, I'm not as talented as I thought I was. And I will realize that there is a ceiling to my talent. Right now, I don't think there is. But if I don't do— but if it's not one of the greatest cartoons of all time, then I failed. And there is a ceiling to my talent. I'm not as good as I thought I was. And I said that to everybody. And was I scared? Fuck yeah. All right? I had trepidation going all the way. Because it's mine to fail. And it would be— and it's failing in front in the mirror too, because I'll know if I did it or not. And I'll be like, OK, Evan, you are not as good as you thought you were. And that got me to Mount Everest.

It's true.

I remember at one point he goes, Robert, can you imagine you and me doing this car chase together, how great it's going to be? And I'm like, hey, man, you're on your own, brother. I'm not going out there, man. I got 5 fucking kids. I'm not going to do your little 100-mile-an-hour bullshit. You want to live the vanishing point dream, buddy?

Live it.

And he did it all by himself, and I'm so fucking proud of him. I'm proud of it.

Is that the big difference between— because I see you in your basement like a Batman with all machines and stuff. It's really precise, I guess, and really what you put, you know what you put, and then you go live.

Yes.

What's the difference? The risk?

The risk, you know, and the risk— and I have stage fright, you know, and I never confronted the risk, or when I did confront— I mean, Belgium, You know, 2000, year 2000.

That was—

you have no idea what it took them to get me to do it. No, no, no, no. I had a thousand excuses why not to do it, and then finally I did it, and it was exquisitely horrifying. That's the only way I can put it.

Complex.

Yes, it was very, very, very complex. And what was really good was right at the beginning, within like 2 seconds, I played just the worst wrong note, and I could either stop and cry or I could laugh, right? And it didn't kill me, and nobody else out there— nobody was throwing anything, you know, it was fine. Thank you to the people of Ghent for for not killing me and giving me the courage and the absurdity. You have to be able to laugh at yourself and you have to learn how to laugh at yourself.

If you say, "I'm a fraud, they'll figure me out, I'll never be able to do it again," that's an artist's thought process. You're an artist. If you're thinking like that, you're on the right track because they all feel that. So there's always some success that can come out even out of your failures. In fact, probably your biggest successes will come directly from your failures. You should almost take that— Winston Churchill's quote is my favorite: "Success is moving from one failure to the next with great enthusiasm." You should be very enthusiastic about your failures because you're going to learn something. You're going to go that way when everyone else is going that way, and you're going to stumble, but you're also going to stumble upon something that no one ever thought of. So, you know, you just keep going and keep going, and you're going to fail and then rise up and fail again. And that's the journey. Up and down, man.

Most of us that come from just normal backgrounds, we don't see ourselves doing abnormal things. The world is full of people who were born on third and think they hit a triple and they've got all this confidence, all this stuff. For most of us, it's not that way. We don't think we're wired or programmed to do something great. Well, I'm telling you, that thought is nothing but a fear. Nothing but a doubt. It's what holds you in place. You gotta work hard on understanding you have within you the power to change, the power to do something great. And those fears are gonna crop up, particularly in the middle of the night when you wake up and you're scared to death about what to do. They're gonna crop up and they're gonna hold you in place. Quite often if you're trying something different, they crop up in the middle of your dreams. When you're asleep at night, those fears and doubts creep in. Understand they're not real. They are things in your head that have been programmed into you by your past life. Wrestle with those fears. You'll never conquer 'em, but control 'em. And go out and live the life you deserve. Choose to win. Control your thinking and go win big.

And whenever people reach out to me and say, you know, I'm doubting what I'm doing, I say, well, congratulations, you're a human being. That's what it means to be a human.

High five.

You doubt what you do. It's that voice inside our head. You know, it's innate in all of us. We're born with the imposter syndrome. So, you know, we don't walk outside of the cave at dark with a saber-toothed tiger. It's like there's a voice saying, don't walk outside. Is dangerous, but we don't live in that same world anymore, but we still have that inside our head, and that's fine, but we need to learn not to let it control our lives, but to embrace that fear. And so I still have it every single day. I mean, we talked about my revenue last month. I still wake up and say, man, should I be doing, should I do this webinar? I have these doubts and these fears, and that's just a reality, and I've just learned to embrace that.

What's the first step to overcoming the fear or transforming the fear?

To witness it, to be the nonjudgmental witness of it, to look at it and say, something's gotta give, right? So if you're unwilling to look at your fear head on and honor it and witness, I always say, if you don't show up for what's up, it will keep showing up. So looking and saying, I witness my resistance, and you see that fear as resistance, fear is the resistance to what it is that you desire. And in the absence of resistance, you become a magnet for what you desire. When you let go of that fear and you transcend that fear, that's when you start to become a super attractor. That's when you start to let what is truly of essence for you into your life, what is truly of service for you into your life, what is true happiness into your life. And so looking at the fear, witnessing it, calling it by its name, and even if you don't have the tools yet, what happens is when you look at the fear and you're like, "Oh, I see this fear. I see this I see how it's blocking my life, and I choose to see it differently. That's when you listen to an audio like this. That's when a book like yours will fall off the shelf.

A catalyst.

Yeah, you open up— Exactly, you open up your consciousness, pretty much. You crack open your consciousness to find solutions rather than find problems. And so when you're not looking at the fear, you're just living in the fear and you're believing in the problem. But when you witness the fear and you're willing to see it differently, you start living in the solution.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know, what did you think of this video? What clips spoke to you the most? What are you gonna take from this video and immediately apply somehow to your life or to your business? Leave it in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Ryan Saplin. Ryan, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and offering to do a review on it for your blog. I really, really, really appreciate the support, man, and I hope you enjoy the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.