The Power of Fear

Hi, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. And I wanted to talk today about the smallest units or maybe the power of fear and being able to unmask your fear once again. If you enjoy these talks, if you enjoyed this one especially, be sure to like it, share it, and that way we know which subjects and which approaches are happy making, which things are working for you guys. Because if it's not working for you, I'll change what it is that I'm doing. So there are a couple of different things here. One is that the thing that is most likely to stop you from achieving the things that you want is fear. It's more likely to stop you than anything else in the world, maybe more than everything else combined. It's not to say that you don't have obstacles because. Because of course, you have obstacles. And you can be the richest person in the world and there'd still be problems. But if you don't have. If you're at a disadvantage in terms of wealth or position or social class or age or any number of other different things, it can be grueling. So if you want to reach your goals, you have to be able to organize all of your skills, all of your energy, everything that you've got in order to give yourself the very best chance possible of reaching, Reaching your dreams. If you don't do that, you're robbing yourself of the potential, of the life, of having the life that you really want. So let me tell you a very specific case and some very specific applications of this notion. I love teaching. I just love teaching. You guys can probably guess. And I've taught at Seattle University and USC and ucla, you know, lectured all over the place. But the classes I was doing at UCLA were of my favorites. I just. I loved it. I loved working with the students. I loved having an opportunity to share my journey with them, to be honest with them. But I remember I was teaching, and this was about 30 years ago, and I was teaching class, and, you know, the student, they were so smart and so sharp and their stories were so great. And these people had real ability, they had real skills. They knew how to take. You know, they were starting to learn. Some of them, at any rate, knew how to take their dreams and combine that with their passion and combine that with the focus of their abilities to produce works of writing. They were actually good. I mean, I was looking at this and I was thinking, wow, this is gonna be a great semester. Then something started happening. They stopped writing, they stopped working. They stopped. They started coming up with excuses why they Weren't working. They didn't have the time was the biggest excuse. And this was coming up all over the place. And one of the things that I know is that if you don't have internal permission, if you don't totally believe that you can have something that you want, that your efforts will be rewarded, then the fear comes up. You're afraid to care. But rather than just be honest and say, I'm afraid, what people do is they'll come up with all sorts of other reasons why they can't do it. They don't have resources or they don't have connections. They don't have this, they don't have that. And in this class, it was the, I don't have time. I'm so busy. There's work, there's this. And I was listening to this for a couple weeks. And I remember going to bed one night, I'm thinking to myself, as I often do, how can I help these people? What can I give them that is going to help them through this? And an idea occurred to me, and it was something sneaky, but I thought, this. This might work. Let me try this. So the next day I'm in class, and instead of teaching, in jumping into it, I. Oh, thanks for all the likes. I love seeing the likes. I love seeing the smiles. That's just wonderful. I love you guys. I really do. This is. I've missed you, and it's good to be back. There are reasons why it's been a while, but hopefully I will be in there more frequently. Instead of talking about writing, I started talking about a television show that I'd seen the previous night. And I talked about. I did talk about writing in terms of structure on the show and the characterization, the themes. And we were having a great time talking. People loved the show. I forget what the show was. I just don't remember anymore. But then we started going into other shows that people had watched in the previous week and the previous week before that. And I had everybody in the class talk about their favorite TV shows, and everybody talked about shows that they'd watched. We had a great time for about 10 minutes. And then I dropped the bomb on them. I said, every single person in this class watches television. That means that there's not a single person in this class who does not have time to write. And they went dead silent because they knew that I had trapped them, that everybody in that class had been lying to us and to themselves about what was stopping them from writing. And then we started talking about fear, and we started Talking about, you know, if you don't have, you know, I. Someone say, well, you know, I can't write with less than, less than a two hour block of time because it takes me an hour to get started. So the question is then, then you spend that time researching how to get started faster. Your problem is writer's block. And that's a matter of learning how to go into flow state more easily. So you do this specific research or what are the emotional tools or the mental tools that make it possible for you to accomplish the thing that you want and be more efficient about it. In other words, once you remove the bullshit, once you remove the excuses, the things that fear hides behind what you have is a bunch of technical things. I don't know how to do X, I don't know how to do Y, I don't know how to do Z. Fine, so Google is your friend. You start actually researching these things. You research the component pieces, then you recombine it. You research the component pieces, you recombine it. Try it again. It's exactly like building an engine. It's not that different. You understand the design of the engine. You get the parts, you put it together. There are this, this exists in every arena. People say they don't have time for relationships. They feel like maybe they don't have time to exercise, whatever. So I like to break things down to the smallest possible component part. And it's always less than 10 minutes a day. Okay? So in 10 minutes a day, you can accomplish a lot with exercise. With, let's say, something like the five Tibetans, you can accomplish a lot in terms of your emotional health, but in five minutes a day, you know, the five minute miracle. Stopping once every three hours and breathing for 60 seconds. You can accomplish an awful lot with your writing by committing to writing one sentence a day. Just one. One sentence a day. Just one sentence a day. If you will do that and you just. If you say, I'm a writer, what is a writer? Writer is someone who writes. Okay? So if I want to keep my identity as being a writer, that's something that's important to me, then I must write. It's very, very simple. It's not complicated. You know, it's like, where do you get the discipline to write? I don't have discipline. I have hunger. There's a difference. Do you have to, do you have to discipline yourself to eat a piece of sushi or a piece of chocolate cake? You have to discipline yourself for that? No, it tastes good. Well, my self image as a writer Feels good to me. So I must do certain things in order to keep that identity. So the pain, the fear of not being the thing feels like a small death. My writing is so important to me that I am willing to suffer the pain of disappointment, the pain of loss of identity if I don't do it. And because of that, I don't have to think about it. Not a day goes by that I don't write. And if all I write is one sentence on a project that's all I do, then I have done the minimum that I need to do for the day. I'm a writer. So it's not like promising yourself, I'm going to do five pages a day. And then if you don't do five pages a day, oh, my God, I'm. Blah. I'm terrible. I don't deserve this. I can't do this. All the crap that comes up in your head, all that stuff that's designed to keep you from being the person that you were born to be. So when I talk about writing, I don't know, I might cycle through some other subjects, but when I talk about writing, I'm going to be focusing on the five or six basic steps of the process that we've created that is guaranteed to get you published. I'm not going to put it any less than that. It's guaranteed. And the first step of it is write at least one sentence a day. If you would like to know, like to have a copy of the entire basic program. You get it free. There's a video that I do that. You can get that video by going to lifewritingcentence.com I'm going to type it in www.lifewriting. writing sentence calm. You know, if you pass this on to, you know, to people who are trying to write, who say that they don't have it, who are throwing obstacles at themselves, that'd be great, because, you know, writers have to hang together to a certain degree. We have to help each other. We have to share the knowledge. I know that I'm sharing knowledge that I got from Octavia Butler and Larry Niven and Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison and just so many other wonderful writers who shared with me over the years. And I just love to pass it on to you guys. So you take care of yourselves. If there's any subject you want me to write on, just let me know. Just let me know. And I'd be happy to frame one of these little talks around it so that whatever it is that's inside my head that will be of use to you. I'm willing to give it to you as fast as I possibly can. Take care, guys. Have a wonderful day. And once again, if you like this, share it. That's how we know. Take care. Bye. Bye.