4 Simple Steps to Overcoming Your Fears and Harnessing Courage

If you were to consistently able to take the action you know you should be taking, whether it's asking for help, reaching out to people, posting on Social Media or even making a big change in your career where would you be a year from now?

Having spoken to and coached so many high-performing individuals, both in elite environments or starting out in entrepreneurship, there is clearly ONE attribute or habit that they all possess that clearly differentiates them from the pack.

Courage.

But how do you build the courage and motivation to push through the difficulty of any change, without being sabotaged by fear or anxiety?

In this solo episode, I share with you 4 proven steps to diminish the fears that are holding you back and build the habits required to start acting and living as the high performer you are.

If you found this helpful, please review and subscribe to the show for more. And as always, do connect with me if you want to contribute to the conversation, have suggestions or are looking to start working on the BIG goals you know you should be going after in life, via Instagram or Email

Transcript

How come there's some people out there who just seem to consistently build wild levels of success, even though you're probably looking at them and thinking, hold on a minute, I'm more competent or more qualified than these guys like how on earth are they doing it? Now in this fascinating upcoming podcast that we've got with former US Navy SEAL commander and New York Times best selling author, rich Devaney, I think we really fall upon one of the key attributes that comes out on top that all high performers seem to display. And even in my own experience, from those around me, from my guests on the performance hackers podcast to those successful entrepreneurs and professionals that I coach on a day to day basis, and that is courage. And just think of it for a second, if you showed up every single day for the next 12 months, without operating through fear or the anxiety that that fear probably creates, what do you think you'd be able to achieve? Now during his 20 years as a US Navy SEAL commander Rich was intimately involved in the world renowned Navy SEAL selection process. And he also led a team to create the first ever Mind Gym in Naval Special Warfare that essentially helped the seals train their brains to perform faster, longer and better, especially in high stress environments. Probably sounds like something you've seen in a film. So do go and check that episode out. It's one of the most insightful discussions I've ever had. But today, before the episode comes out, I really wanted to discuss with you a little bit more about four of the key steps that has helped me build the courage in my life to go on and build more purpose, more alignment with my values, and ultimately more joy in what I'm doing without operating through that stance of fear. So if you're out there, and you've outgrown your current situation, whether it's your current job, or maybe it's a current relationship you're in, I wanted to share with you today, four steps that you can use to harness that courage and to help you build a more aligned and dare I say, a bolder version of life. Now, the first thing we need to do before we get into the four steps is define what courage means to you. Rich had a really great definition here, he said, courage is the ability to step into fear. And I couldn't agree more. I think that fear is definitely the focal point of building courage. And for me, it's that ability to acknowledge and embrace the discomfort, and then find a way to just do the damn thing regardless, because let's be honest, you know, what you need to do most of the time. And the anxiety and the fear actually probably comes more so from the avoidance techniques and the procrastination than it does from just doing the job in the first place. And so here are the four steps to hopefully help you harness and build that courage. Now, the first step is to acknowledge your fears, don't deny them, we want to actually eyeball them, start getting really, really curious and specific about what you actually fear. Now, for me, I like to either write this down on paper or just voiced it myself if I allowed. And when I say write it down on paper, it normally happens in the evening when I'm journaling. I only really journal when I've had a crappy day, because I want to clear the energy state that I'm in. And I know that writing on a piece of paper, when I'm wound up because I've had a crap day, is actually the best way of understanding myself understanding how I'm thinking, my limiting beliefs, and also the fears that I'm operating under. And so however, you can level the playing field so that you can actually come to terms with what you tend to worry about, or what you feel hesitancy the most in life at. And then you can ask yourself if it's a real or irrational fear, but you can't really move anywhere until you know exactly what they are. Now, you should approach this step with no judgement whatsoever. This is hyper subjective, I'll tell you a little story that's quite embarrassing about my understanding of my own fear. And that was when I teamed up with a company called First beat technologies. Now these guys provide really accurate performance monitoring equipment. So you're able to basically understand your stress responses throughout the day using heart rate variability monitors. And I initially really wanted to see what my recovery was like, and what my stress response was, like, over a long period of time, from a couple of days before the flight, and then flying to LA and back. And then a couple of days afterwards to see how my body recovered. And I wanted to really understand my stress response and the impact that the long haul flying was having on my body. But what I wasn't expecting was one of my key findings when I got the data back. Now when I took off out of Heathrow, we took off at a really heavy jet. There were storms around, there were quite a few technical problems wrong with the aircraft as well. So it's a really busy departure. However, when I got the data back, we realised that that event in itself didn't really cause any spike in stress response, which was absolutely mental. However, my biggest stress response, and this was double the stress response as taking off from a busy airfield with a heavy aircraft into storms and technical problems. The biggest stress response I had was actually the day before I went flying when I was sending emails from a company that I was just starting to build. So I had a biggest stress response. I had more fear induction from sending emails than I did taking off

With a heavy aircraft into storms, which is absolutely mental, right? So understanding what your fears are is the first step to understanding how you can inoculate yourself from them. The second step, once you've understood what your fears are, that are holding you back, is to rewrite those fears. Now outside of fears of physical health in dangerous situations, and probably death itself, actually, what we most often fear are these three things. First of all, we fear loss pain, that by changing or advancing in our lives, we will lose something important to us. So for me, this was a complete loss of the identity of my job of the perceived status that I received from others. And this essentially stifled any progress that I was able to make because I wanted to almost preserve this status and this identity that I built for myself, and that fear completely paralysed me for years in taking any action that might jeopardise that. Secondly, we fear process pain. So that is like the mere action or process of changing being too hard for us. Now, here, it's important to understand that before competency, which is what we all are looking for, must come courage. So in order to do the reps, regardless, in order to start and complete the process, we need courage. And then only once we found courage, are we able to continue in that process to find competency. I mean, I absolutely love now starting something fresh and being a beginner again, because it doesn't come with any expectations. So people expect you when you're a newbie to something to not really have an idea of what to do or be very competent at it. And so how can you reframe that process of being rubbish at the beginning and having to go through all of the hard yards in order to get it? How can you reframe that, so it actually excites you. And the third thing we fear is outcome pain, so that all the effort that we put into changing may not lead to a better outcome in our lives. Maybe the grass is not greener in the end. And for me, this is a little bit like the fear of failure in a way, right? That the outcome is not going to be what we want. And that if we fail, we're going to have more judgement from our peers, more people looking at us and questioning our credibility. And so what I do to get over that fear of failure is actually just turn every single action into a little experiment, so that you can't fail if you're just testing a hypothesis, right. And so I set a hypothesis with what I think might happen if I take this action, and then I just test it out. And all I'm looking for is data. I'm just looking for feedback, whether it's good feedback, or bad feedback, it doesn't matter feedback will help you then learn and the failing and the learning is the purpose. And when it comes to rewriting fears as well, there was a really interesting abstract in the book, the pressure principle. And it talked about how we could embrace state anxiety and mentioned that it's not about the amount of fear but the amount of courage that we possess to address this fear. Actually, anxiety can actually be seen as the high octane fuel that we can use to maximise performance. So it's all about how we rewrite those fears in our own brain. A Olympic basketball coach Jack Donahue also said that it's not necessarily a case of getting rid of the butterflies is a question of getting them to fly in formation. And so how can you take those fears and rewrite them so that they become superpowers instead? Now, the third step is to tap into necessity. Now, I think all too often we forget that unless it's absolutely necessary for us to show up and go through the pain. Most of us wouldn't do it. Why would we? So who needs you taking bold action? Like why is it imperative that you start to pursue your true dreams? Now? Are there any people? Or are there any situations in your life right now that you feel you could be stepping up more on? And why is it that you need to go through this comfort in the first place, and really, really connect into that. Now one of the other good ways of tapping into necessity I found is by creating a really compelling personal vision to create and maintain the courage and motivation, you need to push through the difficulty of change. If we're going to take on new ground and raise the level of your performance, you're going to need a vision of the future that is bigger than the present vision and something that you connect to emotionally. And I've definitely in the past struggled to tap into necessity, because when it comes to flying, that's absolutely great. Because we need to take action to perform at an elevated, consistent level for safety. It's what keeps us alive. It'd be a pretty uncomfortable career, if there was no necessity to show up and act courageous, because then we just wouldn't fly into any airport that was challenging, or we wouldn't go anywhere that scared us, right. So in flying the necessity was always there. We needed to perform at our best but that's missing from the outside endeavours. And I found that really, really hard because I had to create the necessity by essentially committing to what I'm building, stating my intentions to my peers, like letting them know that this is what I'm going for, which creates that necessity.

It's easy to step up, because now you've got accountability. And accountability is so, so important. Being responsible to the guests that I have on my podcast for producing good episodes, being responsible to the clients that I coach. All of that is essentially accountability, that forces you to be the role model to step up and display courage on a daily basis, because now you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for a bigger vision. And the fourth step, and this is probably the most important step is to audit your actions. And like you'll hear in the upcoming episode on Sunday action inoculates fear. And the one thing that seems to be really consistent is that high performers have a bias towards taking action, even if the outcome is scary, or risky or uncertain, they just act, they want to ask my wife like how she was able to do some of the scary things she does every single time she wakes up, she just says I just bloody do it. And it's quite frustrating, because you can't really garnish any insight from that. But they just have an ability to understand what's important, and just to act, regardless of the feelings and the emotions that pop up. But one thing that might help you is that you know that when you act through the fair, you automatically receive a dopamine hit, which is awesome, it means that you're getting feedback telling you that what you're doing is good. The other thing I would say on this point is that a lot of people think that courage is all about stepping forward, like the old war heroes in the day. But sometimes courage could be stepping back to an old dream or to not doing something, I think about some of the great leaders of the past that have saved their men from slaughter, and you know, got rid of their ego and didn't fight because they knew that the odds were against them. And sometimes courage is actually knowing when you're beat or knowing that this is not the right path for you. Or that maybe you have been avoiding what you truly want to do. So sometimes courage could be stepping back and admitting that you made the wrong decision, or that you are happier doing what you were doing before. The amount of people that I speak to, that seem unwilling to take a step not even backwards, but sideways, because they're afraid of how it will look to their peers, to their bosses, to their friends. Sometimes courage is just understanding where you're at your happiest, where you're at your most fulfilled and finding a path back to that. See, I always say courage is 20% bravery. 80% habit. With this in mind, if you had even more courage, what habits would you start building now? What actions would you start taking? Because the important thing here is that taking the action shows your subconscious, that it's actually safe to operate in the new environment, what your brain is trying to do is it's trying to consistently keep you safe. And so if you can show it, that by taking the action that scares you, you're still safe, your subconscious will then slowly allow you to take more of that action, and develop that courage. And that courage that's built is then the outlier to the confidence you need to continue to build the consistency and the habits. That being said, taking action is not the only thing we need to do when we're auditing our actions. We also need to understand if you are even more courageous, what would you stop doing right now? Because sometimes Courage comes in the actions that we do not take, you know, what are you saying yes to, that you should really be saying no to How can you live more in alignment with who you want to be and how you want to operate, what things you're doing for other people that are taking away from your own vision. And so understanding your fears, acknowledging and accepting them, rewriting them, so that they actually work for you and not against you. And then trying to find that necessity somewhere in order to take action and create the change that you actually want. Guys, I wanted to finish on one really important point here. And that's this, you don't have to have courage, in order to take courageous action. I'm gonna say that again, you don't have to have courage in order to take courageous action. And we're not talking about having courage and owning courage. It's something that's built up over a number of weeks and years. But taking consistent courageous action is really the differentiator here. And I wanted to share with you a little hack that I use every single time I feel like taking the easy road or making excuses as to why I'm not going to do the difficult task today. And that's a quote that I got from Andre Agassi from his book that open. It's an incredible book, I really, really recommend reading it. But the quote inside it says, I've been cheered by 1000s, booed by 1000s, but nothing feels as bad as the booing inside your own head during those 10 minutes before you fall asleep. And so for me when I'm not really feeling up to it, I actually predict about how I want to feel tonight before I go to bed, and I know that if I've taken the easy road or have made excuses or I haven't completed the task that I knew that I should have completed. I'm going to feel anxious and gonna feel frustrated. I'm not gonna be able to sleep properly. And so sometimes taking courageous action just looks like trying to avoid a feeling that you don't want to feel later on in the day. So whatever

It is that allows you to step up and to take that action that's required. That's all that we're requiring ourselves to do. Courage is only loaned to you, as long as you can take action. And the moment that you stop, that's when it starts depleting again. So it's never a permanent thing that some people either have or they don't. So I thought I'd leave you on that point. Legend. I really appreciate you being here today. And if you wanted to get in touch you're open the conversation further. I'd love to hear from you. If not, take it easy. Enjoy the week and I'll see you next time on the performance hackers.