How to Kill All Fear and Doubt to Become Obsessed with Your Success
Fear and doubt are dream killers
“Doubt is the dream killer. Most people are so filled with doubt they are unable to believe in themselves enough to become obsessed with their own success. Instead they let their fear lead the way.” -Grant Cardone
Personally, I’ve had my fair share of experience with fear and doubt.
I quietly wrote to myself for 6 months without publishing any of it online because I doubted that my writing was good enough, and feared what other people might think it.
And I can tell you that pushing through that fear has been the hardest part in getting to where my writing is today.
As Alex Banayan wrote in his book, The Third Door,
“Many times the hardest part about achieving a dream isn’t actually achieving it — it’s stepping through your fear of the unknown when you don’t have a plan. Having a teacher or boss tell you what to do makes life a lot easier. But nobody achieves a dream from the comfort of certainty.”
This post is going to detail how you can kill all fear and doubt to finally become obsessed with your success.
Here we go.
You Only Have to Take One Step to Abolish All Fear
“No matter what you want to change, it won’t be as terrifying as the first step you take toward making it.” -Ryan Holiday
Psychologists often say that the fear in the anticipation of an event is actually a whole lot worse than experiencing the event itself.
When you anticipated something, the mind has a free plane to wonder.
And as the mind is always looking for the negative while seeking to avoid change, uncertainty, and risk, it will conjure up all the things that could, should and, might go wrong.
Hence why bestselling author, Darren hardy once wrote,
“Left to its own devices, your mind will traffic in the negative, worrisome, and fearful all day and night.”
While when you’re actually faced with the event in reality, unlike in your imagination, the limits of possibility are confined. Thus, most of your doubts will never transpire.
Hence, why taking the first step towards the things that scare you is always the hardest. Once you getting moving you realize there’s nothing to be afraid of and quickly become obsessed with your success.
Thankfully, I have found two effective and practical strategies for making that first step easier:
- Act quicker than your mind can think.
- Reframe the event from a negative to a positive.
Acting quicker than the mind can think means you’ll starve all possibility of doubt and fear emerging as they both thrive on a stagnant mind and lack of action.
Many people are already going to be doubting that you’ll ever achieve the things you desire, you can’t let yourself be one of them.
Secondly, Reframing an event from a negative to a positive means taking that which scares you and transforming it into something that excites you. Make yourself excited with the idea of doing that which scares you and dance with uncertainty and risk.
There’s a Cost of Action and a Cost of Inaction
“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” -John F. Kennedy
It’s a human tendency to favor safe and predictable circumstances. Thus, we often forget that there’s a cost to stay where are, while we conveniently put all the stress on the cost of changing.
However, the cost of staying where you are is very real and far more expensive than the cost of moving forward.
All you have to do to see this comparison is envision yourself 5 years from now having still not done the things that scare you; it probably won’t be very a pretty sight.
While compare that vision with how you see for yourself 5 years from now having done the things that scare you; you’d probably much rather be living in that reality.
Therefore, it’s not enough to simply think about the immediate costs of action.
If you want the true costs of action or inaction, you need put your decisions into the perspective of a larger time-frame because any choice you make you’re going to have to live with for the rest of your life.
If you want to give in to your fear and doubt today, go ahead, but just think about how that decision will make you feel tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that.
Wrote Jesse Itzler wrote in his book, Living with the Monks,
“When you come to a point when you have to make a key decision, remember how that choice will make you feel tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, and the one after that.”
In Conclusion
Fear and doubt are dream killers. They will rob you of your ambition, motivation, and momentum to keep you from realizing your full potential.
However, the hardest part about achieving a dream is often stepping through the fear and doubt of not being able to predict the outcome.
Once you take that first steep, you’ll notice that what holds us back most of the time is entirely in our own heads, and you’ll quickly become obsessed with your own success.
Acting quicker than your mind can think and reframing an event from a negative to a positive are both powerful tools for breaking throw the wall of fear.
There’s a cost of action and a cost of inaction. Consider where you want to be 5 years from now.
