A Story About Overcoming Fear
I’ve already told you about the night when I made the big decision to quit my job in the city and turn my life around.
And, I’ve told you about how my thinking in the weeks before, led up to that decision.
Now, I want to share with you what happened in the days AFTER that big decision. I think its important for you to get some insight into the following days because there were plenty of other times when I made big decisions but DIDN’T follow through on them.
Does that sound familier to you? 😉
Well, I clearly remember the morning after I’d decided I needed to change my life for the better. And I remember the feeling that something had shifted inside. Those daydreams I’d been having were bright and vivid in my mind. They were now a real possibility. I just had to ACT on them.
But I was scared.
It seemed like such a HUGE shift, I was thinking about a total change in direction of everything I knew, everything that kept me feeling safe and secure.
Then, I got to thinking – wait a minute I work in a reinsurance company, one of the most prestigious in the country. We deal with disaster every day. Everyone in the company was an expert at limiting the downside for the disasters that happened every day to wealthy individuals and corporations.
So I set to thinking about how I could commit to my plan, whilst limiting any potential downside.
I made a list of things that I felt scared to give up – even though I wasn’t that happy with them. The two biggest obstacles were leaving my job and leaving my apartment.
Even though it wasn’t rational, I was petrified of leaving the job I was growing to dislike. And I was scared that I’d never find another apartment like the one that I’d made into my home.
The big question was – IF I committed to my dream and went out to find a different way to live my life, a different way to earn a living, in a different place – could I fix things if it didn’t work out. Could I wind back time if it all went wrong?
A new employee gave me the answer I was looking for. He’d just joined the company after returning from Dubai. He told me he’d been in the country for less than 2 weeks, in which time he’d found his new job and a great apartment through an executive search agency.
Now, I wasn’t in the same income bracket to be able to afford the global conscierge service he had used, but I could do the next best thing to put my mind at rest.
So what I did was put together a quick resume with everything I’d done to date and sent it out to a few recruitment agents, just to see what the market was like.
I also visited a handful of real estate agents, just to see what was available on the market and how much things were renting for.
Over a couple of days I collected a lot of information about viable alternatives to where I was right now. I had a handful of alternative apartments and several interview offers for jobs I knew I had a good chance of getting.
In short, I realized, that if I left the city and things didn’t work out, it would actually be pretty simple to come right back and maybe even end up with a BETTER job and a BETTER apartment!
That research, which only took a few days to set in motion, really reduced the fear I had around making a change to better my circumstances. And once I’d reduced that fear I could use my new found courage to set off on a new adventure with the full commitment I knew it was going to take.
Are you ready to see your life in a totally different light? The fact that you’re here makes me think you probably are, so lets dive in and get started…
A Lesson About Magic
More than anything, there is a solid psychological benefit to making a full commitment to achieving anything in life.
Commitment actually changes the wiring in your brain.
For better or worse, every human being sees the world in their own unique way.
Sure, our eyes and ears all operate in the same manner. But there are all sorts of FILTERS between what our senses DETECT and the part of our brain that interprets what those signals MEAN.
Because of these filters, we often PERCEIVE things that aren’t really there. And fail to perceive things that everyone else can!
We’ve already looked at one of these filters.
Our Self Esteem. Which determines what we SEE depending on how much we BELIEVE in our own ability and how much we DESERVE to be happy and successful.
People with HIGH self esteem see OPPORTUNITY all around. Whereas people with LOW self esteem see only MISFORTUNE and hopelessness.
But there’s another filter that plays a critical role. It helps us see the resources and opportunities that are all around us. And COMMITMENT is what triggers this resource into action.
I’m going to tell you how commitment works in physical terms. I know you don’t really want a science lesson. But you do want strategies that WORK and the more you understand HOW things work, the more likely to are to BELIEVE and USE them.
Anyway, here’s what happens inside your head…
We collect information about the world through our senses. Our eyes, nose, ears, nerve endings etc. These senses send signals to the brain for interpretation.
Now, if we sent ALL the information our senses collect to the brain ALL at once, we’d probably go mad.
Right now you are only noticing a tiny amount of the information that’s being picked up by your senses.
You’re not paying attention to the cars outside or the birds in the trees or the people in the other room or the smell of…
What’s happening is, there’s a filter in between your senses and the part of your brain that makes sense of things.
It’s called the Reticular Activating Device or Reticular Activating System. I call it the “Monkey Nut” because it kind of looks like a monkey nut and it’s easier to remember.
Your Monkey Nut is another filter that shapes your unique view of the world.
Your Monkey Nut filters out everything that isn’t relevant to you right now, so you don’t waste time making sense of it.
But here’s the thing. In our day to day life we are SURROUNDED by opportunities to advance and succeed and make more money.
But when our Self Esteem is low or we aren’t Committed to our goals, we literally and physically FAIL to see, hear and feel the opportunities right under our noses.
But when we commit to a goal, whatever it might be, we tell our Monkey Nut to “look out for stuff related to this”.
And our Monkey Nut will go to work for us. Opening the gateway to the brain. It opens our eyes. It sharpens our senses. It allows us to see the world around us in ways we can not imagine. But first we must commit to the goal we have set…
I notice my own Monkey Nut very clearly now. Because I consciously set it working for me with each new challenge I commit too.
And I see it working in other people on a daily basis. They email me that some article, interview or lesson I created has magically come into their lives at “just the right time”. Words like synchronicity are magic are used to describe how I “popped” into their universe out of nowhere!
Well guess what – I didn’t pop out of anywhere. I was here, helping other people for a good long time before, its just that they didn’t SEE me because they weren’t ready to see me.
When they committed to solving the challenges in their lives, there Monkey Nut changed their awareness and POP there I was. Magic! 🙂
So when we commit to a new goal, we must expect to see the world in a different way. This is where we must remember to set boundaries on our goals. Every goal we strive to achieve will teach us something. But not every goal will take us to the place we expected.
We must see our goal setting as steps on a bigger journey. Each step is a test. An experiment. We may go off track, time and time again. But that’s ok. We grow and learn by moving forward and correcting our course as we go.
But we only learn and we only grow when our eyes are fully open. And so we must choose goals that are at the edge of our experience and approach them like the adventurer and the scientist, with 100% commitment.
Take Action, Commit To The Experiment
Check the goal you have set. Is it a goal you can commit to 100%? If not, you may want to adjust it, so that you can. You can’t commit to the SUCCESS of your goal, anymore than a scientist can commit to the outcome of an experiment. But you CAN commit to the test itself, unlocking your abilities and giving it all you’ve got. As Yoda said: Do or Do not, there is no try.