Fears and doubts set the boundaries of your life. But just as easily as you developed fears, you can unlearn the same fears. Because we were only born with the fear of falling and loud noises, everything else was picked up somewhere along the way. If you understand your fears and understand that they are indeed smaller than you make them out to be, you can begin to learn how to attack and overcome them. Loss pain, or the fear of doing something because of what could possibly be lost as a result, can paralyze your life and your business. Learn to take the “what-ifs” and flip them into something positive!
OVERCOMING FEAR PART 1 – LOSS PAIN
Think about all the fears that you have that maybe hold you back. You make your fears out to be these big, monstrous things when, in reality, most of your fears are actually really small. You see, what many people don’t understand is that we are only born with two fears hardwired into us. The only two fears that we are born with are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Everything else, other than those two fears, is a learned fear. They are learned responses which means just as easily as you learned it, you can actually unlearn your fears.
It’s important to note that fears and phobias are two different a categories. What we’re not talking about in this series are phobias such as the fear of spiders or fear of snakes. You’re going to have those fears and that’s fine. This series is talking about actual fears that you look at and go “this is the fear that’s holding me back. I’m afraid that if I try this, something else is going to happen.” If you understand these fears and you understand that they are not as big as you make them out to be, you can start to understand how to battle that fear and attack that fear to ultimately overcome that fear.
LOSS PAIN
Almost everything that is classified as a fear that could holding you back from achieving something you want to achieve falls into one of three categories. Part one examines loss pain, which is a type of pain that is occurring when someone says “I’m afraid of taking a certain action because something else might happen”. It’s when you are afraid of doing something because you feel you might lose something on the other side of it.
This often times presents itself as the “what-if” statements. “What if I try and achieve ______ in my business, but in order to achieve it I have to give up time with my family or my kids?” OR “what if I don’t take evening appointments with my clients and I lose the deals?” OR “what if I don’t answer my phone at 11 PM at night and it’s an emergency and I lose the client because they are upset with me the next day?” These are all forms of loss pain. You’re afraid that trying to do something great in your life is going to result in something you are going to lose that is too painful. Sound familiar? We all have some form of fear that drives us and this is a major one for a lot of people.
I remember my very first speaking engagement. It was a big massive room and I was so nervous I actually made myself physically sick. It was awful because I was so nervous. I thought “what if I do this and I agree to take this speaking engagement and I bomb so bad I never get another speaking engagement ever again!” I was so afraid of trying to do something great because of what it might cost me on the back end.
FLIP THE SCRIPT
How do you battle it? How do you defeat this form of fear? What you have to do is called flipping the script. You have to change the what-if game to more of a positive game. In the above example, I had to think to myself “what-if in taking this speaking opportunity, I actually do really well and ultimately get more speaking engagements coming out of it?” I turned the what-if from being negative (what if I bomb this?) to being positive (I could get more engagements!)
That’s ultimately what’s led me to this success that I’ve been able to have. I finally realized that no matter how bad I am, I’m going to learn something in the process. So what if I bomb? Nobody knows who I am anyway and nobody is going to remember who I am next week. I flipped the script.
Play the what if game on the positive side. “What if I don’t take evening appointments and people start to respect me for respecting my family time?” Understand that by respecting your own time other people are going to respect you. And if they don’t, they weren’t the right client for you anyway.
When you only play the what-if game on the negative side, you blow these little things into big issues and all of the sudden something that’s so small has such massive control over your life and our future. All it is is this little fear that you’ve allowed to grow into this big monster because all you’ve done is entertained bigger and bigger negative consequences rather than thinking about everything you stand to gain if you take the action instead of worrying about what you might lose that wasn’t really valuable to begin with in the first place. That’s what you need to be focused on in terms of loss pain.
What are the things that you’re thinking about? What are the “what-if” questions you keep asking yourself over and over and over and over again? Take all those different things and write them down. Take some time. Write out every what-if question that you hear yourself asking and then flip the script. Come up with the positive version, the more optimistic version of that and see what it does if you start understanding that script.
If you enjoyed this video, make sure you like it or follow us on Facebook or YouTube. Leave a comment below and let me know what the negative scripts in your life are. What are the things you are hearing? What are the what if games you play with yourself? Share your flip of the script with somebody else below because you never know who’s going to need it. You never know who’s going through the same things that you’re going through, the same struggles, the same fears, the same doubts and concerns. Take care!
