Overcome Your Biggest Fears For Success

Hey there. Good morning from beautiful San Diego. Let me see. My glasses are causing a little bit of a glare. How are you doing? I hope you're having amazing. We're gonna be talking about fears, how to overcome your biggest fears. And many of you know that fears obviously reside somewhere in here. So as soon as you join, let me know if you're here. Usually it takes about a minute for people to start joining us and I see the first person has joined. So welcome. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. I guess it's good morning here in San Diego. Let me know who you are, where you're from. I'm just gonna wait a moment. Hi there, Trevor. Where you from? Trevor, nice to have you on. Hi, Michelle. Hi, Subam. High five. Boom. You got a high five, too. Michelle. Hi there. Jana Cox. Nava. Good morning from San Diego. Hi, Martha. Martha. Hope you're doing great. I always ask people, where are you from? You may know. I live in San Diego, which is where I'm at right now. My office here right now. Where are you from? I'm going to let people join us. We're going to be talking about fear today. Vegas. Marcus. Hello there. Tel Aviv. Shalom. Nava Manishma. Guten morgen. Christine Anand from Mumbai. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Safiqa. Hello. Good morning. I usually like to look right at the camera so you can see me looking at you. But right over here, there's all of the notes of who's coming in. Good morning. Good morning. From India, Ashish. Hello. Not hashish, but Ashish. Pretty named. Hey, dying. Hello, Scott. Good morning. Either Les. Leanne. Sorry, I don't have my glasses. I had my glasses on. Let me put on for a second so I could read better. Hello, you wonderful Kiwi. Sharon March from Columbia. Oh, you're in New York City now. Okay, got it. Okay. Stratford, Ontario. You may know I used to live in Mississauga, just south of there. Hi there, Evelyn. Dave Hua. Malaysia. Leanne. Hi there. Okay, good morning. Montreal. My sister and my cousin just left about an hour ago from San Diego back to Montreal where they live. Hey, Juana. Hey, Dave. Good morning, Keith. Good morning, Ozzie. Hello. People from all over the world. Awesome. All the way from the whole world. Cave Creek, Arizona. I almost bought a home in Cave Creek, Arizona, many years ago. So let's talk about this amazing thing called fear. How many people know what fear really is? Is fear your friend. And by the way, every Tuesday morning I do these achieve even more sessions. Can you do me a favor before I continue, I just want to make sure you can hear me and see me. I have my air conditioner on, believe it or not, in my office. Because it's really a warm day here right now. Is the air conditioner getting in the way of my vocal sound or you can hear me? Okay, if you can hear me. Okay, I won't turn it off. Or maybe I'll. You know what, maybe I'll take off my jacket. There we go. That might help. Hold on. And I'm back. Can you hear me? Okay, even though the air conditioner is on. What's up, Mr. Joe Stump. Joe Stump. The legendary Joe Stump. Hello there, my friend. Alright, thanks, Victoria. Thanks, Christine. Alright, so let's chat a little bit about fear. First and foremost from a brain perspective, right? Neuroscience perspective. What is fear like? Where does it happen in the brain? Why does it happen? Is it your friend, is it your ally, or is it your foe? Should you be aware of fear? All right, so let's do a little interactive. If your image is frozen, turn off, off any other programs you have in the background. So let's see what we've got. You can hear me clearly. Great. I think it's about a 30 second delay, maybe 15 second delay for what's going on here. So you like the jacket? Thank you, Evelyn. It's just getting a little warm here in the office here. All right, so fear, Fear, fear. Is fear good for you or bad for you? Parts of the brain called the amygdala. On the inside your temporal lobe, both sides, is a little almond shape piece of matter or mass that is called the amygdala, which is the fear response center, but the emotional response center in your brain. Here's your first little lesson to understand. We'll talk about the difference between fear being an emotion versus a feeling. So fear is one of your six core emotions. Love is another one of the core emotions. But one of the things people misunderstand is fear is a subconscious or automatic reaction based on either what's going on in your head that you're thinking about or what's happening in the external world. External stimuli. And so whenever your brain, okay, picks up information that either comes in through the eyes or through the ears or something that you touch or an environment that you're in that it deems as potential danger. Potential danger. Not real danger in all cases, but potential danger. My brain's falling apart here, so trying to fix this while I'm talking. But real or potential danger based on what's happening in the memory bank, your brain. So you and I for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years have developed this memory bank and associations of what real and possible danger is all about. And anytime that we are thinking about something that could hinder our safety, whether it's our physical safety, financial safety, emotional safety, spiritual safety, physical safety, any real or imagined thought or idea or real event triggers that little amygdala in the brain and activates the emotional response called fear and the associated neurochemicals that go with it. What are those? Cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine. And it's the release of those two chemicals, the neurochemicals, that causes a thing we call is a feeling. And when we have these feelings, the sensations and feelings that are unpleasant, that is when our motivational break goes on and we revert back into doing our old habitual things. Does that make sense to begin with? So fear is an automatic subconscious reaction to real or perceived threat or danger at the spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, financial level, etc. Fear can be your friend. And you can turn fear into your fuel. When you learn how to recognize it, release it, and then use the neurochemicals to actually fuel your motivation. Because the motivational circuit and the fear circuit are interconnected with your motor cortex, other parts of your brain. So when you understand that you have emotions, you have feelings, emotions are what cause feelings, then you could be in better control. And I want to give you an example of a visual to think about. Imagine you're driving your car and you're on a trip, maybe 20 minutes away from home, and the light pops up on your dash. Have you ever taken a hammer from the seat and hit the dash, you know, to get rid of the light because it popped up? Of course not. That would be ludicrous. Right. And what is the light trying to tell you? Well, it's trying to tell you that something is going on, whether it's in the engine, in the trunk, in the back tires, depending on where the sensors are. Well, fear is nothing more than a sensor, or the emotion of fear is nothing more than a sensor. All incoming information from your external world goes through a processing through a place called the thalamus that causes you to be highly aware of anything that can hinder your livelihood. So our number one priority, the brain's number one priority, there's three priorities. Number one is safety above all else. Safety above all else. And so if there is real or potential threat, either because of a past experience, a person, something you've read, something you've seen on television, something that you talked about, With a dear friend that went through something similar to that. That pattern or neural network in your brain around that issue called a memory. And your brain's number one priority is for safety first. So anything that relates to what you want to do, what you want to achieve, that could cause any physical, emotional, mental, physical, financial, spiritual pain or discomfort activates in a billionth of a second the fear center in the brain. And that is a normal ally that you have. It is one of the most sensitive parts of your brain right there with intuition that very few people have learned how to recognize, refrain, release, and retrain. And so fear is not your foe. Fear can be your friend because it's there to protect you. What most people have never learned how to do, which I'll teach you how to do in just a moment, is how to recognize in a state of calmness and awareness. And many of you know, give me one second, I'll do a little shameless plug. My newest book, inner size, just came out a few weeks ago. It's already number one best seller on Amazon in the psychology field. Pick up a copy on Amazon if you like. But one of the things that I talk about in the book are inner sizes. They're mental and emotional techniques to give you better control of your brain. And you have to remember you have a brain, you're not your brain. You have hands, you're not your hands. You have a heart, you're not your heart. So you need to learn how to use your brain better. So before I continue, I want to just thank. We got a whole bunch of people that put in some notes. So these are some of the things you wanted me to talk about. And so we asked you what you wanted to cover, and that was fear of success. What will it take to reach and maintain success? We did a little poll. Fear of failure, Fear of not being good enough. Those are the top three questions that people wanted me to cover today, so I'm going to do that. And so when we feel the emotion of fear, what do most people do? What do most people do when they feel fearful? What is the number one behavior when people feel fear? The answer is. Drumroll, please. Procrastination. Procrastination. When we fear that we might fail, when we fear that we might disappoint ourselves again or somebody else that we've made a commitment to. When we feel that we might succeed and then fail, a couple of other neural circuits activate in the brain. And one of those neural circuits around fear is actually a neural circuit activates by shutting down. It's called the motivational circuit. So when we are in a state of fear, there's one of four responses that we will engage in. One is we will try to fight our way out of it. We will freeze, we will faint. Okay, does anybody know what the fourth one is? So it's fight, freeze, faint, or anybody know it's run away, we run the other way. So we use a variety of different strategies and to run away from any real or potential danger, or we freeze and we don't do anything, or we procrastinate and don't take action. So, number one, let me give you a couple of little techniques. The first thing that I want you to do when you sense that you have this fear is inner size. Number one is called take six. Calm the circuits. So when the fear circuit is activated by the amygdala in the brain, there's neurochemicals that are released as a result of that electrical current that is activated between the neurons or the synapses of the neurons. And so when that neuron release happens, what we know from all the research is that a fear emotion, energy in motion, right? Fear is an emotion. It's energy in motion. And the energy that's in motion is cortisol, epinephrine, or norepinephrine. And in some cases, those are good for you, like if you really have to run away or jump off the sidewalk. But when an emotion of fear is streaming through your bloodstream, what most people do is they either try to suppress it, or what else do they do? They fight it. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to learn how to become aware of the emotion, Unpleasant emotion of fear. And the first thing you need to do is breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth like you're blowing out through a straw. When you take a breath in through your nose, deep, rhythmic breath in four or five seconds and out four or five seconds, and you breathe through your mouth like you're breathing through a straw. What happens is when we're in a state of fear, that is the stress response center in the brain, right? And guess what happens? Heartbeat gets raised, blood pressure gets raised, breathing becomes more shallow. And what you want to do is actually the opposite of that. In a calm and responsive state, fear cannot coexist. So in a fear, shallow breathing, high heartbeat rate, high blood pressure rate, we are continuously activating that fear response. So what you want is be aware first. And in that awareness, you take six deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth. That actually, in 60 to 90 seconds will deactivate the fear response center in the brain and actually reactivate the left prefrontal cortex, which is the Einstein part of your brain, which is the thinker, the imagination, the part of your brain that can actually help you solve what you're fearful of. And when you do inner size number one, then you move to inner size number two, and that's called Aya A I A. Can somebody type Aya A I A for me? I'll give you what AYA stands for. This is a sequence I'm going to give you. I'm going to give you a couple of sequences here. So when you breathe into your nose and out through your mouth first, you are able to respond instead of staying in this reactive state of stress or fear, it's in a responsive state that you can actually make better choices and decisions and deactivate the memory center. And the Frankenstein part of your brain that I talk about in chapter two, I believe in here, your two brains, Einstein, Frankenstein. So AYA stands for awareness, intention, action. So what is this all about? One of the greatest gifts you have is awareness, awareness of your environment and awareness of self. What are you thinking? So in the state of awareness, Aya, I want you to have a piece of paper or go through a mental checklist of what am I thinking right now? Awareness of thought. What am I feeling right now while I continue to breathe? What am I sensing right now? How am I behaving right now? So, thoughts, feelings, sensations, behaviors. You want to become aware, but you have to become aware with this really important lesson here. No blame, no shame, no guilt, no judgment. Pure awareness. No blame, no shame, no guilt, no judgment. So in that pure awareness, you actually will be able to see what's going on. Obviously means see with your inner eye of understanding. And so through your state of awareness. And then if you go to I in the aya, inner size I stands for what's my intention? Well, my intention is to be calm. My intention is to be relaxed. My intention is to be confident. My intention is to take action. Great. Then the A stands for action. One tiny little action steps towards your intention. So one tiny action step towards your intention. What does that do? When you do it in a calm, relaxed state, you actually are deactivated. The neural pattern of feeling fear of failure, of fear of success, of fear of not being good enough. And then you move one step towards what it is that you want to achieve. This small little sequence of inner size number one takes six common circuits and AYA puts You in a state of control instead of a state of reactiveness. Because what happens is whatever neural networks you have built in your memory, if you don't interrupt those neural patterns or networks with a new thought, emotional and behavioral pattern, you will keep reinforcing these psychological and emotional doom loops. And then you're a victim of those reactions automatically, day in, day out. So what this will teach you to do is be in a state of awareness and choice. Now, why do I say awareness and choice? Well, the greatest gift you have as a human being is not your ability to think. It's not your ability to feel. It's your ability to be aware and then choose. You can choose your thoughts, you can choose how to think, you can choose how to feel, you can choose how to behave. You can choose what to start, you can choose what to stop. But it all begins with your higher cortical functions of awareness and choice. Now, let's not confuse awareness and choice with skills and knowledge. So here's what I want you to remember. All of the how to that you need, all of it. We already know. You want to be more, you know, spiritually connected, we know how to do it. You want to make more money, we know how to make more money. You want to build a business, we know how to do it. You want to write a book, we know how to do that. You want to have a better relationship, we already know all the how. The problem isn't the how. The biggest challenge is to get people to do either what they know they should be and could be doing, or to know how to become resourceful, to find the answer, to be able to take action. So does this make sense? So far, I've given you a good little dose there. Let me just check my time. By the way, if you want a deeper, about 90 minute training on organization, overcoming fear, I've got a masterclass, a link to a masterclass that I did. You can choose your own time to watch it. It'll take you about 90 minutes to go through it. It'll blow your mind. I'll give you tons more techniques and tools to be able to use. So my team will give you a link below. It's free, so I'll give you that option as well. I think my team just put it below. All right, so let's go a little bit deeper. There's the little training right there. Hey there, Debbie Sweetser. Fear is not your enemy. Fear can actually be your fuel. Because what happens is when you understand how to recognize what's causing your fear in A state of being relaxed. Then you can go into the mode of switching it and making it better. So one of the techniques that I like to teach is called the 4 4R process. Ready? What process is that? The 4R process. You get lots more of these when you sign up for the free virtual training. And so what's the four hour process? Four process is recognize first. So recognize, you know, what fear do I have? Is it. There's 50 different types of fear? 5, 0. Some of them you're consciously aware of, and most are subconscious triggers. Okay. That causes the motivational circuit to just shut down and you don't take action. You don't even know why you don't. So recognize through taking a piece of paper and write down, what are your fears? Do you have a fear of failure? Do you have a fear of failure? So let's dissect fear of failure. What does it really mean? Right. Failure is a psychological phenomenon that I think needs a lot of work, especially in our schools. Too many people misunderstand or don't understand what failure is and they don't frame it the right way. What if instead of failure and you being a failure, failure was just a feedback loop? What if failure just means that maybe you didn't do the right things, but that you're a genius and brilliant and wonderful? Maybe failure just means that you didn't have the right thought process or emotional fortitude at the time, or the skills or the knowledge at the time, but you're not a failure. You see, when people think of failure, a lot of people associate failing with them. Being a failure versus failing forward and learning. That's part one. Part two is learning how to take failure through the 4R process and reframing it, which I'll teach you in just a moment, is one of the greatest skills you can learn. So when we are in recognition of what the failures are. So the four hour process is recognize, release. Whenever you have the emotion, use inner size 1 and 2. So you release the emotion, the energy emotion that's causing the disempowered feeling. And then you reframe. So recognize, release, refrain, and then retrain as the fourth R. So reframing. What does reframing mean? We can take just about anything in our lives and look at it from a different lens and reframe it into something that empowers us versus something that disempowers you. And so think about this. Is there something in your life that you failed at? But when you look at all of the positive lessons that you Learned from it. It actually can empower you. Well, why not learn to frame things in a way that will always empower you by asking yourself questions, what did I learn? What can I do better next time? How did I become more knowledgeable, more skilled, more aware? When you ask your brain better questions, your brain will give you better answers. And what happens is when people have a negative association with failing, that is what causes this perpetual emotion that they want to run away from. The most successful people in the world have failed more times than most people have ever tried. And they realize that they can fail forward, but they can also learn how to frame things around failure so that they learn and grow and become better. Better. Every athlete knows this. Every entrepreneur knows this. Everybody who's ever written a book knows this. Everybody who's ever been in a relationship that didn't work out knows this. So change the meaning of failure from failing and me being a failure to failing forward and me learning as a feedback loops for what to do next and what not to do. And then the fourth part, which I'll talk about a lot more on how to do this on the free live training, or it's actually not live training. It's a. It's a masterclass that you can pick the time and watch it on your own, on your own time. Retraining your brain is a function of recognition of the patterns that are disempowering or destructive to your success, whether it's physical, mental, emotional, financial, business success. And when you retrain your brain to be more in a state of awareness and choice. And then you develop the positive knowledge, skills, beliefs and habits that you need in order to achieve the goals that you want to achieve, you become the type of person that will achieve every one of your goals and dreams. So failure can be your friend. When you know how to frame failure positively, when you know how to frame failure positively, and you retrain your brain to have the beliefs that you need so that if you fail, you're not a failure. If you succeed and fail, that is predicting in the future of potentially negative consequences that cause you not to take action today. Let me repeat that. Fear of success, even fear of failure. But success especially is predicting an event in the future that hasn't even occurred yet that causes you not to take action today because of potential negative consequence in the future. What you have to remember is 99.9% of your fears are not real. They're all made up in the imagination centers and coming up from the memory centers in your brain. And so you have to learn a little bit more about how your brain works, upgrade your knowledge and skills and have some tools to use and you'll be able to use fear as fuel. And there's one more thing I just noticed, that's why I paused for a second there. When somebody talks about fear of not being good enough, we're dealing with self esteem and self issues. There's only four things that hold people back. One is one of the 50 fears. Two is limiting beliefs that I'm not good enough, not smart enough, too young, too old. Three is your stories and excuses you tell yourself. And four is self image or self esteem and self worth. All those are combined together. Those are the only four things holding you back. There's nothing else. All the knowledge and skills you can have. So those are the things. So fear of not being good enough is all around a self concept that you should be able to fill in the blank. So not being good enough. A lot of cases I'm not. I don't have the knowledge, the skills or, you know, I don't deserve to. So it's a self image issue versus a fear issue. And so there's a whole other body of work I do on that. So it is 9:30 right now. I hope you enjoyed, you know, the two exercises I gave you, the 4R process and a whole bunch more. If you want to go deeper, pop onto the virtual training. Choose the time that works best for you. It's about a 90 minute class. I'll also introduce you to some amazing technology that many of you are already using at NeuroGym to help with mastering your mindset and your emotional control. And I hope you have an awesome day. Hello my friend Dave Buffard. Nice to have you on buddy. I'm so proud of you. Day 32, 33 today for you. So boom. High five to you. All right everyone. Hi there, Debbie Sweetser. All right, so I am just going to say hello to a few people but I do this for about 25 to 30 minutes every Tuesday morning and I appreciate you. If you like this, hit the share button. If you really like this, hit the share button and then give me a little note about what you learned. Hit the love button also. I love seeing those little hearts pop across my screen. Habimana. Thank you. Also pre. Hello Keith. Hello there Bilge. Hello, hello, hello, hello. And to my buddy, Joe Stump. Hey buddy, hope you're doing great. Still living up north. Anyway, I love doing this. I hope you enjoyed this. Have an awesome day. Karen, the link is right in here. Alright. So it's right below the video. I'm gonna wait a second here. Thank awesome. Have a great day. Thanks Vinod. Enjoy. See you next Tuesday, everyone.