Is fear driving your decisions?

Idea: Our fears are less so about falling from a current position than from a farther along one.

It's easy to let our subconscious run rampant. It's natural. There's no way to think of and contemplate everything. The world we live in is an unbelievably complex place. So, our brain identifies patterns and connects dots; and we see, act, think, react, and live. Fear and its homeboy worry are among the most active subconscious elements that drive our behavior. Not necessarily in negative ways, or positive ones, but driving nonetheless and with limited input from us (we think ourselves the driver of the vehicle we're cruising through life in, but in reality we spend most of our time in the passenger seat). Fear and worry kept us safe as kids, through life, and while foraging in the forrest so many generations ago. They protected and propelled our genetic material forward for 70,000 years (technically, very many more). But now, those same protectors and survival agents, though still useful, are meaningfully less so. We are not regularly encountering life and death experiences (unless you're driving in South Florida). We certainly don't want to fall from some great physical height. Do we, however, sometimes assign internally, mentally, emotionally that same fear of falling from some perceived height like status? I think so. Chemically and emotionally we manifest the same terror of being caught off guard, loincloth around ankles, in the jungle by a creative tiger as we do with things that are less severe, like something that may happen at work. It's the same exact chemicals that corse through or veins and so our reactions are very much the same. Think about the anxiety you feel sometimes; I bet that physiological experience is not much different from the one our naked, exposed kin, so many generations ago felt moments before becoming tiger fodder.

Here are a couple (oversimplified) examples:

• Stacey is a student and she knows she can be a doctor. It's her dream. She says it to people. "I could totally be a doctor if I wanted to." She says it to herself too. She's smart. Smarter than Ed who was a total pothead in college that's now performing brain surgery at John Hopkins on patients that would be less comfortable under his scalpel if they know he held the keg stand record in his dorm for two semesters. But the risk of trying to become a doctor and failing can feel much more significant than the risk of not trying and perhaps going after something easier but equally noble, like becoming an ultrasound tech. It can feel safer not to try than to try and fail. Because if you don't try, you can't fail and feel stupid, unworthy, or whatever. If you don't take the leap it's easy to develop a narrative of excuses and logical reasons for why you didn't go after your dream and maybe even victimize yourself like "hey I could have done that, but I didn't because ...".

• George runs a textile business and has a new machine he wants to buy but has to borrow a lot of money to buy it. He's done the analytics and believes, with a high degree of confidence (let's say 90%), that the machine will repay the debt quickly and level up his business (and with similar confidence that if the 10% comes true he can still come out break even); but he perceives the risk of getting approved for the loan and buying the machine and being wrong, even after many calculations, as greater than the risk of not buying the machine; though it's objectively the other way around.

What are you subconsciously avoiding because of fear of failure; or its cousin, fear of success followed by failure? How does it drive your behaviors, nudging you into the passenger seat? What are you avoiding or procrastinating on? Why? Is the risk death by maiming? Or will everything kind of be OK?

Sometimes the risk of inaction is greater than the risk of action. What could you accomplish if you went for it? Because that's what you are risking if you don't.

If you want to take some steps into the fear, but still need some help navigating it, I suggest a fear setting exercise as developed by Tim Ferris.

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