Using Fear To Speed Up Progress In Your Life

I was coaching a client last evening and we got into a breakthrough discussion about what motivates people that achieve a specific desire, goal or outcome in their life versus those that do not.

Our talk was about business, but it holds true no matter what the desired outcome is…losing weight, attracting a meaningful relationship, having people like and respect you, feeling good about yourself, being motivated and energetic…it doesn’t matter.

What it comes down to is properly managing the fear of DOING or NOT DOING in terms of making progress toward your desird outcome.

What is the #1 thing that gets in the way of anything we seek to achieve? 

Fear isn’t it?

We we are faced with a critical point of progress in our life , we become afraid that…

– It won’t work and then what do we do?
– That we will look bad or have a bad reputation
– That we will lose everything we have so far
– That we won’t be able to sustain the outcome
– That we may be rejected

And the really big fear…

“That we personally will not be able to handle any of these outcomes and that something even worse than the current situation will be the outcome” 

That’s it isn;t it?

When do many people experience breakthroughs in their life?

When they HAD to!

In other words, their back was against the way, they were at or near rock bottom, had little to lose and so at that point the fear of failing was tiny compared to the fear of not taking massive action. 

NOW…THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT FEAR

So, if we constantly sabotage our progress by fearing the consequences, doesn’t it make sense that we flip this on its head and reverse the Fear context here? 

In other words, work on making the “lack” of action larger than the fear of taking action. 

For me, as is taught in Attracting Greatness, this changed dramatically when I started regularly practicing meditation.  Meditation allowed me to put the fear of “what happens if I do X” into clear perspective…I could then manage that fear and then deliverately associate conscious thought to fearing the “what if I do NOT do X…” 

Using this approach we can completely control how often and how impactful change can be in our life…despite years of avoidance, procrastination, fear, anxiety and low self-confidence…we can really initiate that change and make it consistent in our life.

Believe me, it’s far better to use Fear than to be used BY Fear. 

 

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Comments on Using Fear To Speed Up Progress In Your Life

May 25, 2012

Kelli @ 12:26 am #

This is great and a lightbulb moment for me. I love the logic of it of turning the fear back on itself. It rings so true to me and I can easily imagine applying it.