Micro Class - How to conquer your fear in 30 seconds!

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey, guys, this is Brian with another video. I am super excited about this one this morning and I appreciate all of your great feedback and support and ideas. I'm having so much fun doing this. And today we're going to do how to conquer your fear. 30 seconds. Yesterday we had fun with how to find your purpose. What did we do yesterday? How to discover your purpose in five seconds. That was a lot of fun. Today we've got how to conquer your fear in 30 seconds. So let's see if we can make a mental shift that will allow us to conquer our fears in 30 seconds. Today's little lesson has two parts. Part one, think theory. Part two, practice. We're going to start with the theory and then we'll wind up with our 30 seconds to rocking it, conquering our fear. So part one, theory. We need to understand there's a difference between fearlessness or having no fear and being courageous. There's a huge difference. And a lot of times we get confused and we think that the people we admire somehow no longer have fear or they never had fear. But the reality is we all get afraid. Pick your favorite hero, whoever it is, and Mike Tyson might not be your hero, but did you know this is in the peak of his career? I was just listening to an interview by a friend of mine, Trip Lanier, who was talking to Tim Ferriss. Great, great chat. And Tim shared a story. I'd heard about a lot of different people with fears, and we'll talk about a couple of them. But Mike Tyson, at the peak of his career, the greatest fighter of his era, was paranoid, was totally afraid before every fight. And his trainer would tell him it's not about not being afraid, it's about what do you do when you feel that fear. Most of us, when we feel fear, we think we've already lost. We think something must be wrong with us because we're afraid. The great people we admire in different domains feel the fear and then they go do what needs to get done. There's a huge, huge distinction again between trying to get rid of our fears and, and realizing it's part of the human experience and then developing practices like we're talking about here today to move through your fear. Bill Russell, another athlete, one of the greatest athletes of his era, I think he was the only guy to ever win a gold medal, an NCAA championship, and a professional championship in the same year. And guess what? He threw up before every one of his basketball games. Really yeah, that's how much he cared and that's how energized he was. And the reality is the energy that we feel before anything is neutral. It's what we do with it that matters. It's actually, it's an opportunity to channel into great, great performance. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second as we talk about our expectations. But I can give you countless examples of this. Tiger Woods. He says the day that he's not nervous when he walks up to the first tee is the day he quits. We're all nervous. We use that extra energy either for good or for not so good. So there you go, Aristotle. Back in the day, he talked about the fact that again, it's not about having no fear. It's about having the right amount of fear and then taking the right virtuous action. He had something called the virtuous mean. He said, if you have too little fear. I'm sorry, if you have too little of the virtue of courage, then you're going to be a coward. You're going to have cowardice. But if you have too much courage and you're going to be kind of an idiot, you're going to be rash. It's kind of like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. It's just not a smart thing. You want to have the proper amount of courage, and then of course, that means you're taking action. Now, courage, another little thing on the theory side of things. The word courage comes from the French and Latin words for heart. So these great thinkers back in the day knew that courage was the virtue that vitalized all the other virtues. Just like your heart vitalizes your arms and legs and all of your organs, courage is the virtue that vitalizes all your other virtues. Without courage, you simply can't fully manifest your potential. So there you go. That's a quick look at theory. But it's really important. It's not about getting rid of your fear once and for all or you're somehow a loser if you have fear. No, no, no, no. So many. Pick your favorite person you admire. They're afraid. It's really funny. Just a personal note. People think I don't have fear. Of course I have fear. I get nervous before I do this. Is this going to be good? Are people going to like it? Are they going to think it's stupid, etc. Etc. It's easy for me to get spun out in the fear, but what I like to do is to remember this theory and then to put it in this practice. So here's the practice. Once we realize that fear is natural, we just got to learn how to move through it more gracefully. So part two, we have three steps to our practice. Step one is to breathe. Tell you about that in a second. Step two is to reverse your desire. We want to get excited about fear. And step three is to optimize our expectations. And then you go do it. I'll walk you through that final steps at the end there. So first step, breathing. Fritz Perls says fear is excitement without the breath. Think about that. Fear is excitement without the breath. Such a beautiful concept. Remember that fear is excitement without the breath. So first step is to breathe deeply. Free yourself up.

Relax.

Just kind of open my shoulders there. Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath right now. Nice long inhale and a nice long exhale. Do that throughout your day. That's a really good practice. Builds willpower. Calms your nervous system. Really, really good stuff. Step two, reverse your desire. This is another idea we talked about the tools and grateful flow. This little idea here, right? That's from the book, the Tools. Fantastic book. I'm going to keep on talking about it. Here's another one. Reversal of desire. They say that here's kind of their model of life. Here's you inside your little comfort zone. Here's your fear, which is keeping you inside your comfort zone. Oh, bummer. And here on the other side of your fear is infinite possibility. All the things that you can do. And your fear, they call it pain, is in between you and. And your possibility. And if we have this comfort zone that we constantly retreat into every time we feel fear and we kind of reverse back into it and we just, oh, no, not today. Maybe I'll do a little more prep and then I'll be ready to send that email or make that phone call or record that video or write that blog post or launch the business or whatever. Well, bummer, because your possibility exists on the other side of that fear that's holding you back. So what they say is you got to recognize that infinite possibility. Think about that. Infinite, infinite possibility exists on the other side of your fear. Now, when you know that you can reverse your desire, and when you start feeling fear, you can say, oh, man, this is a great opportunity for growth. Infinite possibility exists on the other side of my fear. What can I do to bust through my comfort zone, to move through my fear and to experience all that I'm capable of experiencing? Reversing our desire. Quit looking at pain and fear. Something that's going to Limit us and something that's actually going to set us free. Our freedom exists on the other side of our fear. Our freedom exists on the other side of our fear. That's a big thing to know. And, you know, think about the best things in your life, right? My hunches, they came on the other side of you moving through your fear. I can give you a bunch of examples in my life super quick. One first, business. I'm 24, 25 years old, and a friend is at UCLA's business school, and we're working together on a business plan for the business that I was running at the time. And he wanted to enter it into the business plan competition. And I'm at first like, no, no, no, we're not ready. And I was super clear, we're not ready. We enter it and we're scheduled to present, and I've got to fly out there, and I'm just convinced we're not ready. Basically, I'm afraid that we're going to look like idiots. I want to hang out of my comfort zone, and I'm literally as stressed as I can be. I'm nauseous. I don't want to go to this thing, don't want to do it, don't want to do it. And I wind up doing it, right? And we wind up presenting. And I can tell you funny stories about how nervous I was before that. We'll get into that another time. But we did it, and we wound up winning the business plan competition, a competition I didn't think we were ready for. We won this business plan competition at UCLA. We got business cards from all these VCs. We wound up raising a million dollars. We wound up raising another $4 million, hired the CEO of Adidas to be our CEO. And we did some really neat stuff that we wouldn't have done if I didn't. And it wasn't even like a conscious thing. I just kind of stumbled onto the other side of my fear, and there this possibility existed. And I can give you countless examples in my own life, from the mundane of recording this video and moving through my fear to creating other businesses and relationships and all those things. So where are you getting stuck by your fear? And how can you see this infinite possibility on the other side of it? And then how can you bust through your fears and expand your comfort zone? Really, really big idea. So that's step two. Step one, we breathed, took a nice deep breath. Step two, we reversed our desire, and we saw this model working out. In step three, we want to optimize our expectations. So the reality is you're afraid for one very, very simple reason. On this little spectrum of expectations, you have a negative one. If you're afraid, it's very simple.

You expect something to go wrong.

If I'm afraid to record this video right now, I expect you to not like it. Right? Well, that's going to lead to what? Fear. Now, if I expect you to like it or at least hope that one person watches this, which is how I always do anything whenever I'm teaching, I hope one person gets something out of it and then it's worth it for me. If I can imagine that one person, I actually get a little tears in my eyes as I say that. If I can imagine that one person who emails me and said, you know what, that changed my day, that made me have a happier day. Well, guess what? I get excited, I get motivated. I can imagine communicating with that one person. And then my fear moves to excitement. I literally can get excited about it. That's so cool, right? Move your expectations from negative to positive. Your fear moves from your experience, moves from fear to excitement. Really, really cool stuff. So step one, breathe. Step two, reverse your desire. Step three, optimize your expectations. Go from negative to positive. And there you go, you've got a 30 second model to conquer your fears. Again, remember the theory, it's not about getting rid of our fears, it's about developing courage. When we do that, we can spend 10 seconds. When you feel fear, spend your first 10 seconds breathing. Ah, nice deep breath. Just on the inhale. Just think about relaxing and then think about, wow, this is cool. I'm going to reverse my desire and this fear is actually going to set me free. I'm going to move into my infinite possibility. Awesome. You can do that in less than 10 seconds. In the next 10 seconds, I want you to think about the negative thought you're having of what's going to go wrong. And then I want you to think about what's the other side of the spectrum. What could go right? What can go wrong? What can go right? Shift that in 10 seconds. It doesn't need to take 10 minutes or 10 hours. It can go as quickly as 10 seconds. So you breathe nice deep breath and you imagined you're shifting your expectation from negative to positive. Then take another 10 seconds, breathe again. Remember, fear is excitement without the breath. Breathe one more time and then just imagine awesomeness. Just imagine the best possible outcome and just get excited about that and then go do it. There you go. Took me 12 minutes to tell you how to conquer your fear in 30 seconds. But I hope you loved it. This is some of my favorite stuff. I come back to this a lot and I've got some other ideas about how to move through fear and show up consistently day in and day out that I'll share throughout these videos, but I really hope you dug it. Theory, Practice. Don't forget Aristotle. Virtuous mean just the right amount of courage and your breath reversal of desire, your optimizing of expectations and you've got a 30 second plan to rocking it. Alright, let me know what you think. Let me know if you have any other ideas about what we can look at and have another awesome day. See ya.

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