How to Unfreeze Yourself from Fear | Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question of today is, how do you unfreeze yourself from fear? We're going to talk about fear in this episode, and this— sometimes this is a little bit of uncomfortable conversation, but I can tell you there are so many gems that are about to come. So I encourage you to take notes and be really present during this conversation. And we're very fortunate to have back self-protection advocate and expert, Tim Larkin. Thanks for having me. First of all, now while we're talking about this, you hear the sirens in the background because we're definitely keeping it—

Setting the mood.

Right, setting the mood, because now all of a sudden my amygdala is firing off right now. I'm in fight or flight. Um, but this is under real conditions here, and sometimes we're distracted and we— it's so interesting because we did a previous episode, which I encourage everyone to listen to, On situational awareness and really knowing your environment and how knowing your environment gives you power. I also recommend people listen to our episode that we did together, if you haven't yet, on how to learn anything faster by going slower and the power of your own imagination. And so those are 2 critical episodes. Now, if you made it this far, we're talking about fear. And how fear sometimes will make us go into fight, flight, or freeze. But before we talk about freezing, let's talk about fear a little bit. Is fear— is it just do it anyway, feel the fear and do it anyway? Or what purpose does this fear serve for human survival?

Oh, fears, you know, I mean, Gavin de Becker said it best in his book, you know, it is a gift. The fear is a gift, and you have to look at the The problem is people confuse fear with what they're really concerned about. What they're really concerned about is freezing. They're really concerned about being in a situation that's not only fearful, but they don't know what to do and they have no skill sets to deal with it. And that's the real problem. Fear is an amazing motivator.

It is.

You know, we were talking about, you know, even after years and years of both of us doing public speaking and stuff, you still get that right before the event. You get that In there. But the reason the fear actually motivates us, because we know our subject matter and we know to get out there, we know what we want to share. That's the problem with most people when it comes to, say, fear of, of, you know, harm, harm to themselves or something. Oftentimes they haven't looked at any subject matter. They don't know what to do in situations like that. And so a lack of knowledge is what causes the freezing of, of, of people. The fear itself though is something you should absolutely not only listen to but be extremely glad that you have it. These people that say, you know, no fear and all that, that's ridiculous. I mean, you want fear. Fear is probably the reason, you know, I know guys at the highest levels of the special operations world, they always have fear. You know, it's a great motivator.

It gets you present, you know, in the moment. It also is a signal That, like you said, maybe we need to know something that we don't know, or maybe we need to prepare.

And hormonally and everything, you get optimized real quick. You know, you get the adrenaline dump, you get everything there, and if you know what to do with all of that, right, it can be, it can be really, really positive. Where people have a problem is when they fear something so much that they won't even look at the subject. They're going to rely on hope, right? And hope is a horrible strategy. You know, when it comes to that, not just, and I'm not even talking about life or death type things that I talk about with self-protection. I know so many people that sell themselves short because they don't want to learn. They've always wanted to maybe be a writer, and yet they, you know, they give every excuse in the world why they won't just sit down and just put a couple things, you know, down. And so it's that action, taking action on whatever the fear is, is a huge step forward. But do it in baby steps. You know, you don't have to, you don't have to go from 0 to 100 right away. It's like, okay, I know I have an issue. I know I'm— this is an area where I lack knowledge. So I'm gonna just do step by step. And what's interesting is I've taken people through lots of things that are extremely intimidating. And what's interesting is to see them prior to them Going through the event, you know, whatever the scenario I'm going to train them in or anything, they'll be extremely fearful with no knowledge. They'll go through it fearful, and then they're gaining knowledge, and then the fear will always still be there. But what they all say, they go, yeah, but now I know what to do.

That's the difference.

And that's the difference. And so fear, you know, if you have fear and you notice a lack of knowledge, yeah, that's an opportunity. an opportunity to learn.

Like, I went to one of your, your programs, um, and it was— the impetus was fear. It was something happened to somebody I care about, and it sensitized me. It's like, I, you know, I need to prepare, you know, for my sake and also for, for the people, you know, in life that I care about in my life. You talk a lot about social and asocial behavior. Can we, can we talk about that and how you could be able to protect, you know, yourself and trust your own intuition?

There's 2 ways to look at it. I talk about Antisocial aggression and then asocial violence. Antisocial aggression is something that we all can just, we can walk away from. We don't, we don't need to participate.

There's some trauma.

Yeah, it's that annoying person who's just, he's being a little belligerent, but you have the opportunity to leave, or you have the opportunity to just fend them off and leave the area, even though your ego might be hurt, you know, or something like that. Asocial is when it's, it's devoid of communication. You have somebody coming in to, you know, to— obviously it's a predator that's coming into your life. And what's interesting about that is oftentimes they'll use your social skills against you. They will, they will sit there and make you feel guilty because maybe you're judging them or you're, you're jumping to a conclusion. The story I was telling you earlier of my friend's wife, you know, she's coming into a parking lot. It's about 10 o'clock at night. She'd been studying with her 2 other graduate student friends. They had parked on the first floor. She had parked on the third floor. They offered, they said, hey, we'll take you up to the third floor, drop you off your car. She said, oh please, I don't want you to feel that way. As she's saying that, she's seeing out of the corner of her eye this guy who looked a little sketchy to her. She even said to me, she said, you know, I felt like I was judging him. I felt like I was maybe— I felt fearful because he looked kind of like a street person or homeless, and I felt bad about that. I told my friends right then and there, No, I'm fine and I'll just take the elevator up. She takes the elevator up, door opens, there he is. He's right there. Now luckily, she had enough training to protect herself. She got herself out of there but she kicked herself because why? She didn't pay attention to those nonverbal cues that the human body, the human evolution is blessed with. We have thousands and thousands of years of nonverbal communication cues in our body that, you know, in this age we've learned to ignore because we don't want to be— like you said, we don't want to be socially, you know, judgmental of somebody or something like that.

Or anything.

Yeah, and you have to embrace that. You have to sit there and start to embrace— I tell people it's okay to be embarrassed. It's okay to do something that might be embarrassing later. You know, if the worst thing is you think you overreacted and you got yourself out of there and felt bad later. That's good. You want it to be that kind of a mistake rather than the other mistake that people make, which I hear about all the time, is they ignore 2 nonverbal cues and then the act of violence happens.

Right.

The predator—

And then you really have the worst thing that can happen.

Yeah. And that's why I tell people all the time, much of protecting yourself and protecting your brain and having all the things that we've talked about, you know, today, It all evolves around the fact of just embracing the totality of you and your communication skills. We tend to only do what, you know, you and I are doing right now, just talking back and forth or reading stuff. We don't give as much credence to the nonverbal.

Mm-hmm.

And nonverbal is probably our early warning system on a lot of things. And this is where we can motivate ourselves with fear. You know, you have the fear, you have the nonverbal, and you say, something's wrong. I'm going to trust this. I'm just going to leave. Because I have the opportunity right now to get out of here, and I'm just going to do it. Versus, you know, living in living in the world that we like to live in, where everybody is, you know, we think everybody's fantastic, everybody's what, and that's true. There are a lot of great people, and we're living in a time where some of the greatest human achievements are happening right now. But we also are living in a time where predators have had the easiest. You know, chance to just, you know, take advantage of people.

Yeah, we were talking about in the previous episode on situational awareness, where people are just walking around their town, the streets, just on their smart devices, which is not very smart because they're crossing streets, traffic, oncoming traffic. And then people, when we're talking about predators, they can be pickpocketers.

Yeah.

Or somebody that has an agenda. And because your awareness is not on the, you know, you're giving up your sensory systems. And you're contributing to whatever's about to happen by your lack of—

And we make that mistake with fear. You know, we override our fear at times, at times, or we don't take action on the fact. Like, there are many times when I've talked to people before, they said, yeah, you know, I always knew I should have studied this X, Y, or Z because I've had a couple situations where I realized, oh hey, if this went bad, I wouldn't know what to do.

Right.

And that's where you have to, again, engage your fear. Fear can be a great learning tool. You know, it can sit there and point out to you, you know, hey, here's some knowledge that you don't have. You probably should look at this. If this is bothering you to the point to where you're fearful, you probably should engage the subject, not run from the subject. Engage it, learn about it, you know, be part of it. It will still be maybe scary to you, but you'll understand it. understand the components and what works. It's the people that just hope for the best that, you know, have the biggest problem with fear because it just amplifies the fact that, you know, they've done no work. The reason I love being able to do, you know, podcasts like this and reach audiences like yours is because, you know, Jim, as I was telling you, normally it's a 70/30 mix for people that come to see me. If your folks don't know me, that's probably a really good thing because the people that do know me know me very well because something's happened in their life.

70% of the people that go to you have had some kind of like violence or some kind of bad things happen to them that made them—

and I can't undo what's already been done, but when I get those 30% of people that fortunately they haven't had anything like this, I can give them skill sets to minimize the chance of violence ever coming in their life. But you have to face that Fear. You have to say, "It's okay. I'm willing to look at this subject. I'm willing to learn this." And yeah, yeah, I'm talking about self-protection. But people do this in education. They do this on on things to make their lives better. A new skill set that could possibly you know teach them how to maybe maybe do copywriting, maybe learn marketing, learn some skill set. But they'll let fear just stop them in their tracks rather than use fear as like hey. I have a fear of this, therefore I'm going to engage it. I would encourage everybody, engage a fear that's not too overwhelming. Start with something that you're scared of, you're a little bit fearful of, but it's not, you know, it's not like a life-threatening situation. It's just maybe it's a subject matter that you just didn't, you know, you're scared of, or maybe it's a language you wanted to learn.

Or like maybe it's math. Yeah, people have an irrational fear of numbers.

Great. I mean, the cool part about this too is I'm so jealous of my kids because the incredible knowledge is available to them at their fingertips to learn something. Like, if I wanted, you could just go to the Khan Academy, right, and just start learning math over again. Again, I mean, there's so many great resources that are out there. There's no reason to have irrational fear.

So, a big takeaway, I think, from this conversation is learn to trust yourself. First of all, when you are in that parking lot and you feel uneasy, and somebody is, you know, you know, you feel threatened in a way, then, you know, social norms aside, you know, protect yourself first.

Yeah.

And also just fear is a signal to us that if you don't want to freeze, then just prepare, prepare for these situations. And even in the last episode, we were doing these thought experiments of like worst-case scenario. And if you prime your mind on the worst, what's the worst thing that could happen, and you still, you're okay with that, Then, you know, that thing probably will not happen, but at least your mind has gone there so you're not surprised, so you don't freeze up.

Yeah, I have my clients oftentimes will make things so much more extreme in our heads and exaggerated that when the actual event happens, it's easy. It's like, wow, I thought it was gonna be a lot worse than this, you know. And I learned that, I learned that going through a lot of, you know, harsh military training, that I didn't try to think about getting through the whole course. I just get through the day, you know, and then even then we broke it down to meals. We'd say, okay, I'm gonna quit, but I'm gonna quit at lunch. And then you get at lunch and you have some lunch, you go, okay, I'm gonna— now I'm gonna quit at dinner, you know, and you just play these games with yourself that then all of a sudden you just realize after a while, now you're comfortable with the subject matter. I mean, I remember one time I was in a military unit that I had to learn a very extreme obstacle course, and it scared the hell out of me because I tried to do it on my own. And I realized, oh my God, I can't get— there's no way I'll make the times. There's no way I'll do it because I knew what it was. But I had 6 weeks to prepare. You know, they don't just throw you in. And I took those 6 weeks to go step by step and learn it. And something that really was intimidating to me and scared me, by the end, by having that deliberate approach and just, you know, overcoming my fear of it, 6 weeks later I was laughing. I was like, I can't believe I was that intimidated by this particular thing. thing. But I made it into something that was, you know, just huge as a young kid. And that taught me to, you know, trust. The other thing I will tell people real quick is I had the first time I trusted my nonverbal. I went to USC on the West Coast. And especially in the, in the '80s, when I went there, it wasn't really good neighborhood surrounding, surrounding that. Came home one day, phone was ringing in my house, an actual real phone that you had to go answer. So, I took my bike. I had a bike and I took my bike and I left it on the porch of this little bungalow I lived in and I went in to answer the phone and then I heard some rustling and I heard some action and I knew somebody had stolen my bike. So, these 2 kids stole my bike and they're taking off with my bike and they got a pretty good start on me. I just, without thought, just put the phone down, ran after them, okay? It's dusk. It's, it's, it's, it's there. A couple blocks off of USC, it gets— if you ever saw the movie Training Day, It was like those type of neighborhoods.

Mm-hmm.

I ran down, I'm running down the street after these guys, and I noticed they're kind of looking back at me, and they're about a block and a half ahead of me. They stopped and they just looked at me. Here I am, this 19-year-old kid, and it was like something came down on me. My whole body just— it was almost like it just was, was just grabbed. My nervous system, everything, just screaming at me, going, No, don't do this. And I quickly thought, I said, you know what, I can always buy another bike. Maybe they can't afford a bike, they can have my bike. And I just, I knew, I knew nothing about the area, I knew nothing about there, and I was there. And from then on, I had no problems. I trusted my nonverbal. Yeah, you know, that just happened to be a seminal event for me, but I know everybody's had those events.

You've had those events where your body's told you what to do, and you just have to start trusting This is the kind of thing that, you know, it's, it's, it's, you learn here in communication with other people, as we talked about, but also communication with yourself.

Yeah.

And be able to trust that, that, that wisdom that's inside. Tim, I know right now people are amped up, and they want to go more, and they want us to go deeper. How can they go deeper with you?

I cover most of the subjects that we talked about, you know, obviously, my stuff's geared more towards your own self-protection. So if you want to follow me on Instagram, I'm easy to find on Instagram. And then if you'd like to take a small course, free course, just go to surviveviolence.com and there's some great information that you can start, you know, really elaborating on what you and I talked about today.

Amazing, Tim. As always, we'll put the show notes and some of the big ahas that I had in this conversation at jimkwik.com/notes. As well as all the links and connects to Tim's books and his speaking and his training, both online and in live. I highly recommend it. As a challenge for everybody, as I always do, I recommend and challenge you to take a screenshot of this episode because I feel like when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. And one way of doing that is posting it on social media. Tag Tim, tag myself, and share your big aha. Or share your stories, like your stories if you're willing to, around fear. Because I feel like, you know, it's kind of cheesy, but we're, we're a team together. Together everyone achieves more, and we get to learn from each other. So maybe by sharing your story of fear or surrounding around fear, that somebody else reading it can be inspired to make a change and transformation in their life also as well. As always, I'll repost some of my favorites also as well. And included on this one, I'll also send you some of my favorites. I'll send a copy of Tim's latest book also as a thank you, because leaders are readers. Tim, thank you.

Thank you again.