You Should Define Your Fears Instead Of Your Goals

What we most fear doing, asking, saying are very often exactly what we most need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? We all know goal setting exercise. What about Fear setting exercise? What should we define our FEAR or our GOALS? Let me start this blog with a story. I am totally aligned with acronyms of the FEAR which I read somewhere as False Experience Appearing Real. Most of the time people suffer in imagination and that leads them to self criticism and self paralysis which in turns make them inactive. One of the quote I found in this talk which worked as a catalyst for me was "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,". We all have some or the other fears. Some of them has well founded ground and necessary for our survival but believe me, most of them are like ghosts in the shadows. They disappear the moment you throw some lights of courage. They flee away if you try to grab them with your mighty hands and try to put them on paper. All those FEAR that has been cultivated by your mind due to fertile land of imagination, disappears in the light of acceptance.

They disappears when you try to put reality around them. Now let me take you through the story, I just promised. Its story about a criminal who had found guilty for committing a crime. He was brought in front of the king and was told, he has got two choices of punishment. One choice of punishment was to hung himself by a rope and the second was to take the punishment behind the big, dark, scary, iron door. Criminal without wasting a fraction of seconds choose to be hanged with rope, but when the noose was being slipped on his neck, he takes a turn towards the king asked the king, "Now I have to die, but before death out of curiosity, I want to know what is behind that door?. " The king was amused with his question and started laughing. He said, "You know dear, its very funny. I am sitting on this throne for years and I have given this option to all the criminals who has ever come here for punishment. But without fail, whenever I have asked for choices, everyone has the same choice to get hanged on the rope. The criminal get amused with the reply of the king and said, "King, now I am really curious, please tell me before I die. Did I made a wrong choice? What is behind that door? The king paused for a moment, taken a deep breath and answered, "FREEDOM, but it seems most people are so afraid of the unknown that they immediately take the rope. Lets take a pause here.

Some of us are just like that person who day in and day out not choosing the freedom but choosing the rope because of the fear of unknown. Think about a while. Are you not afraid of speaking your mind to your boss? Are you not afraid of asking a raise? Are you not afraid of speaking what you strongly felt during your office meetings. Are you not afraid of taking a leave or a long vacation from office? Are you not afraid of leaving your job and start something which you wanted to do from your early childhood. By not facing the fear, anyway, you are choosing the rope. Give a try for unknown, who knows freedom may be waiting behind those unknown walls. In this purposeful talk, Tim Ferris, an early stage tech investor, best selling author and podcaster, talks about the hard choices. Tim has suffered himself with self depression and has been too close to death. To avoid this for future, he develops a fear setting exercise which has helped him and has helped millions as of today. He encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detaisl, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls "fear-setting. " He suggest three pages written plan.

First page consists of three step process i. e to Define your fear, find a way to Prevent them from happening and if it really happens and you have to face the doom's day, the plan to Repair them. Most of the time worries seems very big when in our mind but the simple exercise of putting them on paper, taking out and sharing them in this way can really help us to get perspective. Questioning the fear and writing about them and being man enough to talk eye to eye with fear is best way to conquer them. The moment everything is on paper, its like "the skeleton is out of the closet". This helps you to dissect, bisect and do whatever you want to do with that skeleton. Simply keeping that skeleton inside you closet may give you many fearful nights. Tim Says, "this is visualizing the worst-case scenarios, in detail, that you fear, preventing you from taking action, so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis. My problem was monkey mind -- super loud, very incessant. Just thinking my way through problems doesn't work.

I needed to capture my thoughts on paper. So I created a written exercise that I called "fear-setting," like goal-setting, for myself. It consists of three pages. Super simple. " But not taking action is not a solution and it should not an option. In Tim's words "What we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo, not changing anything. " I find the suggestion of Tim as practical one and we all should define our fear along with our goals. In order to achieve our goals we need to do the fear-setting exercise, which make easy to achieve our goals. This is the only way we can live up to our pull potential. He says "It's not a panacea. You'll find that some of your fears are very well-founded. " but in order to live life fully you need to make some hard choices.

During his talk delivery he has mentioned a quote from his friend "Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. " You can ponder on this whenever you are afraid of doing something. This will boost your mind for taking hard choices in your life. I suggest to put this quote as an reminder on your laptop/desktop/ipad/mobile backdrops, on your office desk, or on the wall of your office and if possible on your bathrooms walls. Don't think much about bathrooms walls, [I see some of you are stuck here and might be thinking which place in bathroom walls. ] you decide your best place. This quote will give you all the strength which is required to lead a successful and fear free life. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears-Les Brown