Facing Your Fear? Think Again
April 5, 2012 | Posted by PRO U | Tags: MIGHT, Personal Development, Perspective | 2 Comments
There’s this idea in personal development that you’re supposed to face your fears to conquer them. Former Navy pilot JT DeBolt says that approach is all wrong. JT suggests a different mindset for overcoming the mental obstacle that is your fear.
“How many pushups and squats can you do?” asks JT. “Now ask yourself, how many half squats and half pushups can you do? Going halfway in terms of your focus and activity level will go way less than half as far as going all the way would. When it comes to success, doing a half pushup is getting you nowhere.
And that’s exactly what you do when you face your fears in business. Facing your fear, according to Tony Robbins, actually weakens you.”
JT has his own story about fear to relate from his days as a Navy pilot. “As part of my aviation training, I was required to pass what’s called an Oral Board examination, where you stand in front of pilots who grill you for four hours about your knowledge of your plane’s systems and tactical situations. As the date for my Oral Board approached, I thought about taking it and it scared me, so I kept putting it off. Putting it off kept decreasing my confidence and made me want to push it away. I thought about failing, and it made me nervous.
By focusing on my fear about it – facing my fear – it paralyzed me.”
So what brought JT out of his fear-induced stall? “My Commanding Officer called me one day and told me my Oral Board was the next morning. Man, was I scared. But I knew at that point I had no choice, so I studied my material all night. The morning of my exam, I was nervous, and the pilots who were there to grill me could see it. But they could also see I wasn’t scared to death, which you can never be as a Navy pilot. And in the end, I nailed it,
because I had to. It was go time, fear or not.”
Although JT still felt that fear the morning of the exam, he was in a place where it couldn’t hold him back anymore. And it turned out to be nowhere near as bad as he made it out to be in his own mind. “We look at fear like a real barrier – a brick wall,” JT says. “But it’s just a facade, like a background in an old movie.
So often, we make a bigger deal out of our fear than it really warrants. It’s always worse in your mind, which is why facing it and focusing on it can hold you back. Don’t face it. Don’t even let it look you in the eye. When you first start feeling it,
just push through immediately and do whatever is in front of you that made you feel it. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is what gets you through. It only has the power to hold you back that your mind gives to it. If you just power through, you take away all of what fear can do to you and give it back to yourself.”
JT DeBolt is featured on the MIGHT Mastery call every Wednesday at 10:30 AM Eastern time. Additional MIGHT Mastery with JT and Patrick Combs is every Thursday at 7 PM Eastern time.
Just like what Nike says “Just do it”
So true, JT. Too often our “fears” are based on a false perspective, which leads to an inaccurate belief, that empowers a disabling behavior. In a way, it was an outside force (the CO who scheduled your exam for the next day) that stopped your continued empowerment of your own fear-based behavior. You had no choice but to change your perspective (your time was up), take the test and realize you’d been prepared all along. Sometimes all we need is that outside force (coach, leader, etc.) to give us a nudge in the right direction. Thanks for sharing.