This is part of a series of posts inspired by the ideas in Seth Godin’s free ebook entitled What Matters Now.

The ultimate lesson of regret, the one that will help guide you into a rich and satisfying future, is this: Every time life brings you to a crossroads, from the tiniest to the most immense, go toward love, not away from fear.  – Martha Beck

Given what I do for a living, I run into a large number of people who aren’t excited about what they do at work. I ask them what they like to do. I ask them what they are good at. If I know them well, I mention some of their obvious talents. Then I ask them why they don’t do one of these things instead of what they are doing.

After they laugh, roll their eyes, or give me a blank stare, I usually hear something like this:

• I’d look stupid – I didn’t go to college to just be a belly dancer.
• I’m not smart enough to be a political writer – all the people who do that have lots of experience and education.
• What will my parents/friends/family/coworkers/church group think if I become a professional psychic?
• No one will pay me to make scrapbooks.
• I can’t make a change until I am sure I can make money as a personal trainer.
• I just need to put up with waiting tables for now – someday I’ll make a change.
• I’m too busy looking for a job. Once I find one, I’ll have time to think about what I could do with my event planning talents.
• I’m too worried about paying the bills to think about being happy.

Notice anything interesting about all of these responses? Yep, they are all  based on the same thing: FEAR.

I’m not saying you should go off and follow your dream of becoming a professional belly dancer if you don’t have a means of supporting yourself or your family. Or if, shall we say, you aren’t really cut out for skimpy, shiny outfits and shaking body parts in close proximity to strangers. Likewise, I am not suggesting that you pursue something you are obviously not prepared to tackle. I’m a realist.

However, as long as you are thinking about what you fear, you aren’t thinking about what you love. And fear will keep you stuck forever in an endless cycle. Anne Jackson, author of the upcoming book Permission To Speak Freely: Essays and Art on Fear, Confession and Grace, put it well when she said that “fear plays the role of antagonist in the story of your life.” If you listen to fear, you’ll never even have the opportunity to truly explore what will make you happy.

If this sounds familiar, try one of these methods for breaking the fear cycle:

Visualize yourself as if the fear does not exist.

This technique works because it allows you to experience the feeling of doing what you want in a safe environment: your mind. Simply imagine or visualize a day in your life as you do the thing you love. Athletes use this tool to visualize risky moves so they can train their mind to get past the fear before they put themselves in mortal danger. This technique works particularly well if you hear yourself saying things like “I can’t”, “I couldn’t”, or “I shouldn’t” because it allows you to “see” and “feel” yourself doing it. You may find that you enjoy the feelings so much that it is worth taking the risk and giving it a shot.

You might also realize that the problem isn’t really what you thought it was. For example, Nancy was a successful businesswoman who was an avid scrap booker in her spare time. She dreamed of starting a scrapbook business, but was convinced that she couldn’t earn any money organizing other people’s memorabilia. I took her through a visualization exercise where we explored a day in her life as a professional scrap booker. As she described her day, she saw herself booked solid, making more than enough money. But she also noticed that she was alone. This was deeply troubling to Nancy because she is a very social person. She realized the real fear wasn’t about money at all – it was really a fear of being alone. Nancy realized that in order to make her business dreams come true, she needed to explore her fear of being alone – and possibly find some friends who also like scrapbooking.

Research, research, research.

Sometimes fear of the unknown can keep us paralyzed. If you have the distinct feeling that you are about to jump into a very deep pool without knowing how to swim, maybe it is time to get some more information about your dream. Take some classes, talk to experts, read a book – whatever you need to learn more and feel comfortable that you have the skills and knowledge you require. Then you might find that your fear begins to dissolve on its own.

Figure out what you are REALLY afraid of.

Fear is a slippery little thing. Like Nancy found out, it can sometimes make you think you are afraid of one thing, when in fact you are afraid of something else. Another example comes from a client I’ll call Jonathan. Jonathan told me he was terrified of speaking in public. The problem was that his new job as Vice President of Customer Service, which he loved, required him to speak to groups on a regular basis. So, I started to work with him to build up his confidence related to public speaking. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, the fear persisted. After a few sessions, I stopped and, on a whim, asked Jonathan what topic he was speaking about. He told me he attended board meetings every quarter. As the head of customer service, he was responsible for presenting the company’s customer satisfaction metrics. “How are the metrics looking?,” I asked. “Well,” Jonathan said, “they aren’t looking too good. I’m making progress, but the department was in pretty bad shape when I took over.” At this point, I went with a hunch: “Wow, it sounds like that could generate a lot of conflict during the meeting.” At this, Jonathan’s eyes started watering. Hmm. What we really had was a fear of conflict, not a fear of public speaking. Once we figured that out, we were able to wiggle it loose. If this story sounds vaguely familiar, take some time to really dig deep and see if your fear is actually a screensaver for what is really holding you back.

Determine whether you can deal with the worst-case scenario.

Just recently, I made some business decisions that are relatively risky. I realize they might not all pan out as I hope. But, I decided that my business was important and I was willing to deal with the worst case scenario that could result from these decisions: this could include closing up shop, trying to find a low paying job so I could pay the bills, and swapping my cushy condo for a studio apartment, or worse, moving in with relatives. Do I expect this to happen? No. Do I want to fail? No. But if I do, I know I can deal with the absolute worst that could happen if my business risks don’t pay off. Can you deal with YOUR worst case scenario? If so, it might be time to consider moving toward what you love instead of away from what you fear.

Do you have other ideas about how to move past fear? I’d love to hear about them, and I’m sure others would too. Please leave us a comment…

Willpower:

“The strength of will to carry out one’s decisions, wishes, or plans.”
(American Heritage Dictionary)

This topic is near and dear to my heart, and it seems particularly appropriate this time of year. When I first started coaching, I focused on productivity. I helped people identify goals, articulate steps to achieve these goals, and then create systems to achieve them. We worked on organizational systems, how to create and work through a task list, and methods for reducing procrastination. Sounds good. Except that people wouldn’t do it. Even though they had defined their goals and created systems to get there, they still didn’t make progress.

Apparently, Ramit Sethi saw the same thing. Ramit is the author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and here is what he has to say about willpower:

We love to believe that willpower determines our actions. “If I just try harder,” we tell ourselves, “I can lose that last 10 pounds.” Or save $200/month. Or improve our time management. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Willpower is important, of course, but there’s more to behavioral change than just trying harder.

You may be trying to improve your life and career by focusing on things that matter, things that you love. But this requires changing your habits. And changing habits is not about willpower alone. It is about changing the way you think. And that can often mean working with a part of your brain that you aren’t consciously aware of and which doesn’t respond to logic.

In a fascinating U.S. News & World Report article, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak explores how your unconscious is making your everyday decisions:

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.

Szegedy-Maszak goes on to tell us about Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor of marketing from the Harvard Business School. Zaltman was interested in determining “what made people buy one thing and not the other. In the world of neuroscience, this goes to the heart of the profound questions of motivation.” Zaltman ended up creating tools that allow companies to figure out how to access the 95 percent of the brain that motivates choices. He did this by “accessing the deep [unconscious] metaphors that people, even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or feeling or place.”

Another example provided by Szegedy-Maszak comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s awesome book Blink:

In Blink, Gladwell describes how the Coca-Cola Co. made a costly mistake in using data from blind taste tests between Coke and Pepsi–in which Pepsi was emphatically preferred by most cola drinkers–to change the recipe and create the marketing debacle that was New Coke. Still, even with a less preferred taste, Coke remains No. 1 in the soft-drink world. More recent research that was published after Gladwell’s book was finished may explain why.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine offered 67 committed Coke and Pepsi drinkers a choice, and in blind testing, they preferred Pepsi. When they were shown the company logos before they drank, however, 3 out of 4 preferred Coke. The researchers scanned the brains of the participants during the test and discovered that the Coke label created wild activity in the part of the brain associated with memories and self-image, while Pepsi, though tasting better to most, did little to these feel-good centers in the brain. P. Reed Montague, director of the Brown Foundation Human Neuroimaging laboratory at Baylor, explained…: “There’s a huge effect of the Coke label on brain activity related to the control of actions, the dredging up of memories and self-image.” The point, says Montague, is that “there is a response in the brain which leads to a behavioral effect.” And curiously, it has nothing to do with conscious preference.

So, the bottom line is that we often do things (or don’t do things) because of hidden stuff that is stuck in our brain. Nice.

The good news is that there are things you can do about it, and it doesn’t necessarily require that you go through the time consuming process of figuring out why the hidden stuff is there, or even that you know exactly what the hidden stuff is.

There are many tools you can use to access your subconscious mind, including meditation, hypnosis, dream analysis, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), directed visualization, and stream of consciousness writing. Personally, I experienced amazing results using hypnosis to get past some of my hidden blocks. During hypnosis, you are able to access your subconscious mind and “install” new scripts or metaphors to replace those that are blocking your progress or making it harder to break bad habits. This still means that you have to do the hard work of making changes, but at least you aren’t working against hidden ick buried in your brain. I was so happy with my results that I decided to become a certified hypnotist myself.

If you find that you are not doing things you really want to do, or you do things you really don’t want to do, the path to changing your behavior is to change your subconscious scripts. Regardless of how you choose to do it, the goal is to get the conscious (read: logical) part of your mind out of the way so you can access the scripts that are sabotaging your good intentions. This is the key to making willpower work.

Do you have other ideas about how we can access our subconscious mind? I’d love to hear about them, and I’m sure others would too. Please leave us a comment…

The fact that many of the articles in this ebook are overtly (or sometimes covertly) self serving made me flinch a few times as I read it. Obviously many of these authors have a vested interest in promoting certain opinions and trends. But that’s always the case, right? It doesn’t change the fact that there are some great messages in this book. At the very least it provides a wonderful list of ideas to consider, including some that we probably don’t often contemplate such as parsing, neoteny, being dumb, nobody, slow capital, and mesh.

If you haven’t read the book, you may be a little confused. Good. That will get you thinking. And to add my unsolicited opinions and commentary to the mix, I’m going to choose ideas and messages from this book and expand upon them in this blog. My slant will be about how you can use these ideas to improve your life, your career, and your business.

First up: Willpower. What is it, do all of us have it, and does it work? Stay tuned…