Brian Johnson breaks down FEAR as fusion with negative thoughts, excessive goals, avoidance, and remote values, then counters each with DARE: defusion, accepting discomfort, realistic goals, and embracing your actual values. He shares his own values of purpose, consistency, grit, humility, and patience.
Foreign. Hi, this is Brian.
Welcome back to another micro class.
This one's on Fear to Dare. It's inspired by the Confidence Gap by Russ Harris. So he says, what's stopping you? What's stopping you from living your life as a daring adventure, Living your greatest life? He has this acronym, fear. He says, what's the antidote to fear dare?
Let's walk through that now.
Fear. What is fear? Well, the F is fusion. We just talked about the fact that you do not want to be fused with your negative thoughts. If you are fused with your negative thoughts, you are going to be caught in fear and unable to move toward your goals the way that you'd like. The E is for excessive goals, right? So you've got goals that are stressing you out. That's a great way to paralyze yourself. And then we're going to talk about how to deal with these in a moment, right? But then the A is avoidance of discomfort. You're going to be paralyzed if you avoid discomfort. Again, this is a fun one.
I'm excited to unpack a little bit more here.
And then the R is remote values. You're not connected to your values, which we just talked about in the last micro class. That's fear. That's a good way to make sure that you do not pursue your highest ideals. Fusion, Excessive goals and avoiding discomfort and remote values. Now, how do you deal with that? The antidote is to dare. D E or D A R E Dare. What is D? D is you gotta move from fusion to defusion. You want to observe the negative thoughts rather than be driven by your negative thoughts. We just did a micro class on that super big idea. And then the A is to accept discomfort. We gotta remember Anders Ericsson. All the great teachers tell us that our life exists on the other side of our comfort zone, right? If we only live in here, we are never going to grow. Literally, by definition. We cannot grow if we are just inside our little bubble. We need to go outside of it, outside of our comfort zone in order to grow. Well, by definition, what do you feel when you move outside of your comfort zone? You feel discomfort. Discomfort is not a fun feeling, right? Most people want to feel good in order to take action. This is the confidence gap, right? I got to feel like it in order to do good. But when you go into your discomfort zone, by definition, you're not going to feel comfortable. So you need to accept that discomfort. You need to get really comfortable feeling uncomfortable. You need to dare, right? Then the R is realistic goals. So we go from avoiding discomfort to accepting discomfort. We go from excessive goals to realistic goals. You take that huge, huge goal, you take a sledgehammer to it, right? And you get little baby goals and you go crush those realistic goals, right? That's a really powerful way to dare to live your greatest life. And then the E is to embrace values. Don't be remote from your values. Embrace your values. We had our little six values or instant success, right? If you're some of my values, for example, include purpose, right? So being purpose driven by being consistent, being gritty, being humble, right? These are some of my values. Now, I don't need to be experiencing unbelievable success in my life to feel instant success if I'm living on purpose. My purpose, of course includes optimizing my life and helping other people optimize theirs. That's success. Doesn't matter what the world outside is showing. Am I getting results immediately? Doesn't matter. I'm on purpose. I've embraced my values. Am I being consistent? Showing up like a pro, that's a very important value for me. And to the extent that I do that, I feel really, really good. Am I gritty? Am I dealing with the challenges and seeing it over the long run and then am I humble? Am I seeing the areas where I can continue to improve? Patience is another one of my big ones. By the way. These are my values as I embrace these values with realistic goals, accepting the fact that I need to feel discomfort and in order to grow and diffusing from negative thoughts, that gives me some engine, some mojo to go out and dare and deal with the fear. So think about this. Pause for a moment and reflect on how your life interfaces with these variables and what you can do to optimize.
A little more today.
Hope you enjoyed. Here's to daring and living our great wild adventure.
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