Is Fear Holding You Back?

Expand your comfort zone by feeling the fear and doing it anyway, says Ian Child

As the co-founder of a property development training business, I’ve become familiar with one of the more obvious and immutable laws of success: information is useless without application. For instance, my company can teach anyone all they need to know about property development, but if that knowledge isn’t put to use, there’s no point having it. Consider the training and experience you have gained in your field – has all the knowledge and ability at your disposal brought you to where you want to be in your career? If not, you may be being held back by fear.

Who Are We?

Back in the day, I hosted group training sessions where I occasionally asked my students the following question: ‘My genetic profile is a 99.9% match with one of the world’s most famous celebrities – but can you guess which one?’ As a middle-aged white male, I would receive a range of guesses, all of whom were famous, middle-aged white males. My audience’s logic was presumably that if our genes were similar, we must look similar, too. My answer surprised them. ‘But you look nothing like Oprah Winfrey!’ they would say. At this point, I would reveal that it was, in fact, a trick question since every human shares 99.9% of their genetics with every other human. So, congratulations – you’re all as biologically similar to Oprah as I am.

The point of my question was to help establish another immutable law of success, ‘It’s not what you ARE that determines your success; it’s what you DO.’ Oprah is a successful billionaire broadcaster, businessperson, and celebrity. But the tools she has in her armoury are identical to your own. If you’re not currently as successful as you’d like to be, it’s not because Oprah is different to you. It’s because she acted differently.

Know Yourself

One of the problems that most people have is that they don’t understand how their brains work. The person you think of as ‘you’ is, in reality, just your conscious brain, which accounts for around 2-4% of your brain power. The other 96-98% of your brain power is owned by your subconscious mind, which is entirely separate and controls some stuff that your conscious mind doesn’t remotely understand.

For example, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, your subconscious will selectively kill off 35 million cells in your body and then create 35 million new ones – and the ‘you’ that is currently reading this article didn’t even know this was happening, let alone understand how you did it. And that’s just a fraction of your subconscious’s capabilities.

Your conscious and subconscious share the same body but don’t speak the same language, so they can’t directly communicate. They also have different goals. Your conscious wants things like fame, fortune, and success, whereas your subconscious simply wants you to stay alive and make babies.

This situation wouldn’t be a problem if your conscious and subconscious could only focus on their own thing. But the subconscious can’t help itself. It perpetually looks at what your conscious mind is up to and it worries quite a lot about what it sees.

Instinctively Risk Averse 

Another quirk of the system is that your subconscious hasn’t evolved much since our cave-dwelling days. In those times, if you put your head above the parapet, you ran the risk of being either excluded from your clan or attacked by a rival. Either could result in your demise, so your subconscious developed a powerful self-preservation instinct. It doesn’t like it when you draw attention to yourself – like asking for a promotion or pay rise you know you deserve. And it worries a lot about what others think of you. The problem is that no one has told your subconscious that we no longer live in caves. So, if your conscious brain decides (for example) to get up on stage and speak in public, then your subconscious sees this as you putting your head above the parapet and thinks there’s a strong possibility you’ll get yourself killed.

Now, you might suppose that your conscious mind, knowing that these days people don’t usually get killed for speaking in public, would just think, ‘Silly old subconscious, getting all worried about nothing.’ However, that’s not what happens. This is partly because your conscious mind wasn’t aware that the subconscious was worried in the first place, but it’s also because your subconscious deploys a secret weapon that it has at its disposal – it controls your emotions. No one’s quite sure why evolution thought this would be a great idea, but it is what it is. And because your subconscious can’t talk to your conscious mind directly, it uses your emotions to try and influence it instead.

To see this in action, try making a speech in front of an audience of a few hundred people. I guarantee you’ll be able to make the same speech solo in front of the bathroom mirror without a hitch. But as soon as you even think about taking to the stage where people can see and judge you, your subconscious will think, ‘That idiot’s trying to kill us again’ and will start throwing emotions at your conscious mind to try and stop it. The emotion it uses in this scenario is fear. You’ll feel nervous, sweaty, and even nauseous. It’s an entirely unpleasant feeling. And even though your conscious mind knows that public speaking can’t kill you, it dislikes the fear feeling so much that it usually prefers to skip public speaking altogether just to avoid it. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that your subconscious isn’t very discerning about the volume of the fear signals it throws at you. If you’ve ever been fearful of doing something and then found it went better than you expected, it’s because your subconscious exaggerated the fear tenfold. Not very sporting of it, but in its defence, it did think you were going to die.

Expanding Comfort Zones

Now, I used public speaking as an example because it’s a common thing for the subconscious to worry about, but the same rule applies to anything that sits outside your comfort zone. In fact, by definition, stuff that your subconscious is okay with is inside your comfort zone, and stuff it’s worried about lies outside. Remember, if you feel fear or any other emotion, it’s your subconscious that’s causing it, so make sure you understand why.

To be successful, you invariably have to do different things, such as take risks or sell yourself and your ideas. These are all things that your subconscious dislikes, and so it sends your conscious mind fear signals. As a result, many people never leave their comfort zones and so never find success. Successful people, on the other hand, recognise that the feelings of fear are just their subconscious minds worrying about things that aren’t actually going to materialise (e.g., death from public speaking) and so appreciate that feeling fear is a good thing – it shows they’re operating outside of their comfort zone and are therefore making progress. The good news is that comfort zones expand based on experience. If your subconscious sees you survive public speaking often enough, it becomes more comfortable with it. It’s why stage actors and newsreaders aren’t perpetual nervous wrecks.

Be Honest with Yourself

We’ve established that, just like Oprah, you have the ability to be successful. So, if you’re not yet as successful as you want to be, something must be holding you back. Quite often, it’s simply a fear of putting your head above the parapet – or a touch of imposter syndrome that makes you think that you’re not cut out to be successful. Or a simple case of fearing that people will judge you as you take your first steps on a new path. Either way, your subconscious pulls the strings and prevents your conscious mind from acting.

So, if you want to be successful, it’s time to give control back to your conscious brain. You won’t stop your unconscious from making you fearful, but now that you know it’s operating on a false premise, you have a fighting chance of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.