Conquering Fear 101

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting About Conquering Fear 101. How to Alchemize Fear into excitement and use that energy as fuel and to reach your potential. As always, we have 10 big ideas. We'll take a quick look and then we'll dive in. The first big idea is the heartbeat of optimizing. This class could have been called courage 101. Conquering fear 101. Courage 101. But we've got to remember that Aristotle's number one virtue when he tells us that the meaning of life is to basically reach our potential, to live in as a eudaimon, have a good soul, to be the best version of ourselves. You do that by living with virtue. And the number one virtue, courage. It's the heartbeat of optimizing the heartbeat of you becoming the best version of you. I say heartbeat because the word courage comes from the Latin word that means heart. So just as your heart vitalizes your arms and legs and other organs. Vital organs, courage vitalizes the other virtues. We're also going to talk about a great quote from a guy named Stan Beacham, leading modern day mental toughness coach. He says fear is standing in the way of you reaching your potential. Therefore, conquering fear should be your number one priority, your primary goal in life. Powerful stuff. We'll talk about that more. Second big idea is when we want to conquer fear is to know that it's not just you. You're not alone. I wish someone told me when I was 5 years old and 15 years old and 25 and 35, that it's not about me being me, as my old coach Steve Chandler used to say. It's about me being human. We all experience fear, as David Reynolds says, a Zen psychotherapist. Anyone who says they're never afraid is both, and I quote, stupid and lying. Common humanity. We all experience fear, so let's quit shaming ourselves. We will talk about that more. The third big idea is to seek. We're going to look at the etymology of the word conquer. Conquer. Two little Latin words. Basically, it means to successfully seek. That's what conquest means. Conquer means to successfully seek. The cur part of it means to seek. So if we want to conquer fear, paradoxically, we need to seek fear. We need to quit avoiding things that freak us out and lean into them, approach them, as psychologists would say. We're going to talk about the importance of that. And walking through fear doors, an idea we talked about in Greatest year ever 2019. The fourth big idea. We want to become Master Alchemists. So the subtitle for the class is Alchemizing Fear into Excitement. That energy you feel when you feel fear, it's neutral energy until you put meaning on it. We want to use that neutral energy to our advantage by alchemizing it. We're actually going to reference Paulo Coelho in his Alchemist. A couple of great quotes in there. He says, you've got a mission in life and the only thing that's standing in the way of making it possible is your fear of failure. So we want to become master alchemists, using every moment to move from fear to excitement. Those little micro moments of stepping through those fear doors are going to give us the power we need to reach our potential. The fifth big idea. Reverse indicators and fuel for your V12 engine. Reverse indicators. A lot of times when we experience fear, we think something's wrong. My coach, Phil Stutt says, no, no, no, no. It's a reverse indicator. It's not a sign that something's wrong when you experience fear. It's a sign that something's right. If your ultimate goal is to reach your potential, right, and you know that that requires you leaving your comfort zone, which by definition feels uncomfortable, then that feeling of discomfort should be a reverse indicator. Should be an indicator that you're doing the right thing, not the wrong thing. We'll talk about interpreting our fear that way instantly and then seeing it as fuel for our race car engines. We'll have fun with that metaphor. The sixth Big Idea. We're going to look back on a lot of the ideas we've talked about in different contexts. From I'm excited and Bring it on and starving fear of its favorite food, time, the challenge versus threat response, et cetera. But. But in this class, we're going to focus on becoming masters, right? So master alchemists practice this moment to moment to moment. We don't wait for the big thing, where we either have heroic courage or not. We know that the big things come through the tiny things. So we're going to talk about the importance of using those tools as often as we can throughout our day. The seventh Big idea is expectations. You want to conquer your fear. We're going to talk about expectations three different ways. High expectations, low expectations, and expecting things to go wrong. A long term horizon, a short term horizon, and some other fun things. The eighth big idea is heroic energy. It's hard for me to go through a class without talking about eating, moving Sleeping our fundamentals well, guess what? You might have noticed we when you aren't well rested and well resourced, you don't feel as courageous. Therefore, getting your physiology right is a critical component to getting your courage right. We're going to shine a spotlight on your fundamentals, identify again the number one self care habit that just keeps you in the game. And we're going to know that we need to make 100% all in commitment to that. And when you don't do that, the data you get and the fear that you feel, it's just not helpful. We're going to talk about dysfunctioning heart rate monitors as an analogy to dealing with days when our fundamentals haven't been rocked and we've got the gremlins going, etc, etc. The ninth big idea is cookie jars, highlight reels, reasons to believe, and you at your absolute best. We're going to talk about former Navy SEAL and Army Ranger David Goggins. Ridiculously inspiring guy if you know his story. He says we need to create cookie jars. We've got to know those for him. And we'll talk about why he calls it cookie jars. But those moments in our lives where we just were at our absolute best, he says we need to savor those and conjure them up when we're facing our biggest challenges. It's a powerful way to conquer fear, to know who you were at your absolute best and to know that you're capable of doing whatever is demanded of you in this moment. We're going to translate that into energy bars and again, use that fear and that stress as fuel for you to reach your potential. And finally, our 10th big idea. We need to get really good at flipping the switch and becoming the antifragile, heroically courageous version of ourselves. Remembering the fact that courage as Aristotle defined it and as we will discuss in the first Big Idea isn't about not having fear. His virtues were always in between two vices. You can have too little of a virtue or too much of it. So courage is about feeling the fear and then doing what needs to get done. We want to get good at flipping the switch and becoming being that best version of ourselves and then duct taping the switch so we just are that best version of ourselves. That is a quick look at the 10 Big Ideas is let's jump in next step go to optimize me and sign up today.