Fight the fear by leveraging your courage

Everyone talks about fear and of how fear can keep us from making our dreams come true.

The problem with fear is that is wreaks havoc on our successability, the second factor of self motivation. So long as we are afraid, we are not going to be motivated to pursue our dreams.

My favorite quote about fear is from Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon. Redmoon was a beatnik, a hippie, and a former manager of legendary rock bank Quicksilver Messenger Service. The last three decades of his life he spent in a wheel chair after a car accident in the Bay Area left him a paraplegic.

Redmoon said:

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one's fear. The timid presume it is lack of fear that allows the brave to act when the timid do not. But to take action when one is not afraid is easy. To refrain when afraid is also easy. To take action regardless of fear is brave.”

Redmoon’s point is: don’t let fear rule you. Be conscious, make a decision. Decide whether you want to make your fear more important than your vision. If you do, so be it. At the very least, you should consciously make the choice.

This is great advice, but what do we do if we just aren’t brave? Is there something we can do when the choice we continually seem to be making is to let fear win, to let our fear overpower our dream, and block us from making this change we desperately want to make in our life? Are we stuck in the misery of only wishing for our dreams?

No, we are not. If we look deep down in ourselves, we will see that there is courage there, maybe not a lot, probably not as much as we would like there to be. But it is there, and the answer to our problem is to leverage the courage we do have.

Fear is an emotion. It’s like instinct, it serves an important purpose in the wild when it results in an immediate response that may save the life of the animal. A deer is grazing, it smells a wolf, it feels fear and immediately runs. Because of the fear, the deer lives to graze another day.

But people need to treat fear differently. Fear can serve the purpose of alerting us to possible danger. But then we enter that uniquely human part of ourselves, the place of reflection, in which we rationally look at the fear and decide what action we are going to take. This is what separates man from beast, and gives us so much power.

One action we can decide to take is to leverage the courage we do have. To leverage our courage, we need to take the dream that we are too scared to go after, and break it down into a series of steps that we are brave enough to take.

Let’s take an example.

Our vision is to start our own company. This is the change we want to make in our life; we want to be our own boss. This is pretty scary stuff, even for a brave person. But when we break it down into its parts, each part is not that scary. Let’s look at some of those parts:

1. Figure out what business we want to start. (not too scary yet, and maybe lots of fun)
2. Research our prospective business (lots of work, but still not too scary)
3. Put together a business plan (even more work, but still not too scary)
4. Make a time line of the steps we need to take to implement the business plan.
5. Start implementing, one step at a time.

Two things are often what scare us: the enormity of the change we want in our life and not knowing what the change involves.

By breaking that major change into its component parts we negate both these things, which makes the change feel much safer, and helps motivate us to make our dreams come true.