Brian Johnson explains that fear comes from negative expectations. By shifting your expectations from negative to positive to super-positive, you can transform fear into excitement. A guided exercise walks you through naming a fear and reframing it step by step.
Hi, this is Brian with another mini chapter from a Philosopher's notes. This one's called Fear and Expectations. Are you afraid of something right now? Pause for a moment and identify one thing that's kinda or really stressing you out. Might be that you'll never figure out your purpose in life. Tonight's date might suck. You won't be able to pay the rent next month. The world's going to implode, kids are gonna grow up to be criminals, whatever. Got it? Alright, now, I can guarantee you that your fear is tied to a negative expectation. You think something's going to go wrong, perhaps really wrong. So let's look at this line here. We've got a spectrum of expectation from negative to positive. The more negative, the more fear you have and the more positive the expectation, the more excitement you have. Good news is that there's a remarkably simple, though not always easy way to fix it. We've got to shift from that negative expectation to a more positive one. As we do that, we shift from fear to excitement. It sounds simple and well it is. The trick, of course, is actually doing this when the fear gremlins invade our minds. Let's identify the negative expectation that's producing your fear and see if we can create a more positive expectation. And if you're feeling spicy, let's imagine something so positive that you actually get excited. So my negative expectation, you may want to press pause and write that down right now. What's your negative expectation and what's a more positive expectation? How can you take that negative expectation, make it a little bit more positive and then what's a super positive expectation? Go from negative to more positive to super positive. There you go. That's fear and expectations. To recap, if you're feeling fear, check in on what you're expecting to happen. It's negative to shift from fear to faith to excitement. Shift your expectations from really bad to. To okay to great. It's powerful stuff. Fear and expectations. Hope you enjoyed. Here's to creating more positive expectations. Being realistic, but creating more positive expectations about what we think is going to happen. Again, this is building that optimism muscle we've been talking about quite a bit. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. In the meantime, as always, have another awesome day.
