Have you ever had something challenging that you wanted to complete?
Maybe engaging, finishing a project
or writing something and publishing it, sending
it out to your friends? Well, if you're like me, which I
bet many of you are, I can make
all kinds of excuses not to get it done. And I rationalize it,
saying that if I only prepare a little bit more,
if I only get a little more information, do a little more research,
refine my skills more, then
I'll be ready and I'll feel like getting it done and launched.
And that's a problem. For where your fear lies, there lies
your task. I'm engaging in focusing
on fear, letting that fear get in the way. But I'm
rationalizing it, and I'm not even saying it's actually fear.
So today we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about
the only way to confidence is through
fear. Three principles to keep
in mind that'll motivate you to push through.
We can become grateful for our fears because they show us the work
that we still need to do. I have this whiteboard that I've shown hundreds of
clients over the past decade. I call it dcg, and
the D stands for decide. So if you visualize this on a
whiteboard, if you're watching the video, you're going to see this actually illustrated.
The decision is something you commit to. You decide that you want to do something,
you want to make some calls, you want to grow your business, you want to
start a new relationship. Once you decide, then
after that decision is made, it's not going to be all
roses. You're going to have to have courage to push through,
or else it wasn't a courageous decision
in the first place. Now, if you're a great bowler and you decide to go
bowling, then you're really not doing anything courageous. Now, if you're Adam,
who's not a good bowler, who wants to become a good bowler potentially, maybe in
the winter months here in Wichita, then I'm going to have to have courage to.
To grow that skill. So it's courageous for me. It wouldn't be
necessarily courageous for you. So you decide, and then you have to have courage.
And then behind that courage is fear and uncertainty
because you haven't done it before, because you don't know what the results are going
to be, because you won't have any evidence that you can even do it well
yet. Yet is the key question. So. And then you push
through that fear and uncertainty because you have courage. Then on the
other side of that is where you grow confidence is where you see you
have new capabilities, is where you uncover talents you didn't actually know you had.
You grow as you push through the fear. The only
way to confidence is through fear. And this creates this
DCG cycle. You decide you have courage,
and then you grow. And then you grow and you gain the new capabilities and
new confidence. By the end of this episode,
you're going to be energized, knowing
that you. You can push through and that the good
stuff is on the other side. The new relationships, the
increased revenue, the better health,
the new talents, the
confidence, the belief in yourself. The good stuff is as you push
through, it can become a lifestyle you're going to see
today, that you can do some things, take some specific actions
to grow. So I faced a fear recently. I
invited two friends to play golf, two of which I don't believe I had ever
played golf with them before. I know I hadn't played golf with them before. Invited
them, they said, yes, we played golf. Both were much better golfers than myself.
It was a lot of fun. Just played nine holes. So I'm your host, Adam
Gragg. I'm a legacy coach and a family therapist.
And my passion in life is teaching people and organizations,
inspiring them to live with courage,
relationships. That's where it's at.
That's where most of this fear comes from. That's what
we need to face. Fear is so deceptive and cunning,
and we can rationalize it, justify it, minimize it,
holds us back. Have you seen this in your clients? Have you seen
this in yourself where you get stuck in.
In ruminating, in talking yourself out of why you
can't do it and saying, I want to get healthier.
But then once you've, maybe you've even made the decision.
But after that, all these excuses, you know, I don't want to work out this
way. If the weather's not good, I'm not going to run. If my friend
can't work out, I'm not going to work out. It's too expensive to go to
the gym. It takes too much time. All these things
start to cripple you, and it's all fear. If you recognize it as
fear, as fear, you're going to have space from it
and more power over it. Three principles to keep in mind.
Principle number one is that you'll never feel
ready. You can grasp that, you can come
to terms with that. You can choose to accept the fact that you're
never going to feel ready. And there's a big difference between
not Being prepared and, and being over prepared.
Fear drives us to do both. Not preparing at all.
Fear driven. We procrastinate over preparing. We become
perfectionistic. There's that fine. There's
that amazing space where you know
that you could be more prepared. You've done your work
and you're choosing to step forward through the fear, knowing
that there's uncertainty and there's fear. That's the kind of courage of the
DCG model.
You will have at times a burst of motivation to
do something, and that's great. But ultimately
that motivation is going to wane because
it's based on dopamine. It's based on this
chemical reaction that gives us this energy to get something done.
That's a great thing. And you're going to have that at times. But what's better
than motivation is discipline. It's you recognizing that
you don't feel ready, but you're going to do it anyway because it's in your
calendar. You've made a commitment to it, to other people. You've made a
commitment to yourself. And you're choosing to lock yourself in your office
or get up out of bed when you know you're miserable
in the cold because you've made a commitment
and you know that you're not going to feel ready. Sure,
you can be more ready and maybe you need to get.
Be more prepared. Maybe that's one of the challenges for you. But this
discipline is your friend. I had
a friend who shared with me some insecurities
that he has as a boss in holding his team
accountable. And he told me over the weekend, I just don't know why
I can't get over this. I don't know why I'm always stuck on what they
think about me. And I, and I hold back and I don't have the conversations.
And then it's the same old thing again and again. And the conversation
went something like this. I mean, have you scheduled in
situations where you have an opportunity to connect in a way where you could
share some feedback with them, what are you doing to prepare for those
conversations in advance? We had that talk.
And so he, in his case, can be more prepared for those
interactions. He can write down some thoughts and express, get down.
What is the situation he wants to address as a boss to hold his team
accountable. But ultimately he had. And he must
recognize that he's never gonna feel completely
ready for me. I know
that I can get to a place where it's a seven and I can launch
it. I'm not gonna feel ready But I'm gonna get
feedback still from it. I'm gonna feel good launching it. There is a dopamine hit.
Sharing a new podcast or sharing a new piece of content
that's been written, that's exciting. But I
have to still recognize and accept that I'm not ever going to feel totally prepared.
So that's my challenge to you. Resolve that you'll never feel
completely ready and accept that as fact and use
that as something that motivates you to be disciplined
in the face of not actually feeling ready. So second principle,
knowing that we have to push through our fears in order to grow,
that's how we gain confidence, is through fear. Is
principle number two. Scheduling your fears is
necessary? Yes. I mean those tasks
and situation, like my buddy Allen's
talks with his coworkers, the people he supervises, put it in the
schedule so that you are less likely
to make excuses because it's there. Less likely
to not say that you forgot or not say you didn't have time
or not say that it didn't happen because it was crowded out
by other things on your schedule. No, there's no excuse because you put it in
your schedule. There are emergencies that come up. People show up
to work because it's scheduled and they want a paycheck and they don't want to
lose their job. People show up to
weddings and funerals because they put it in their schedule. Or life events like
graduations or even fun things that they
have playing with their friends, like golfing. They put it in their schedule. They have
a tee time. They know that other people are counting on that tee time and
so they reorient the rest of their schedule in the day so they can
make that specific thing work out. That's what happens when you schedule a
workout in the morning. You may be like myself. I'm sure
you can relate to this, that if that's on your schedule. So to go to
the gym, then you may hopefully be thinking about that at the end
of the day. When am I going to go to bed? What am I going
to do in the morning at my workout? Who am I going to meet there?
Maybe I can invite somebody to meet there because it's in your schedule. Maybe it's
a last minute invitation to a friend who's been talking about going to the gym,
but he makes excuses as well. So you say, hey, I'm going
at 6, you can join me. If not, even if he says no,
you're probably 10 times more likely to make it to the gym because you told
Somebody about it. Big time stuff
right here. So scheduling it is necessary, that is
necessary for you to start facing your fears. I would encourage you
to start by scheduling when you're going to wake up and when you're going to
go to bed, and then also scheduling for the week when you're going to get
exercise and then putting in some of these tasks that you're afraid
of that you can plug in. Is it having
tough conversations with your co workers? Is it making sales calls?
Is it reaching out to family that you love and care about, but you're not
making an effort to reach out to them? Schedule it, because those may be some
of your fears as well. Those connections with your friends, those connection
times with family could very much be strong fears
for you. Put it in the schedule. Hang out with your wife, watch
TV at night. Maybe you're learning how to interact in a different
way, connecting in a different way, and it's on the schedule, so.
But that anticipation will also add opportunities for
you to be more excited about these events in your life as well.
One of my favorite interview questions
I was having hanging out with a buddy who runs
a division at a company locally on Saturday we were
talking and it was at a
restaurant place and you know, we were just, just having a good
time. And there were other people around us as well
because it was a coffee shop type like setting, you know,
chairs around. And so other people were listening in on
our conversation. And one of the topics of the conversation was our
favorite interview questions to ask people. And he had his. And it was
like, yeah, he had his question and I thought about
mine. And one of my favorite interview questions relates to discipline
and other people because it's a very attractive quality. So
it has to do with hobbies and interests. And I'm
really interested in that about them. But one of the things I'm picking up, something
I pick up from that question is their level of discipline
in their life. So they tell me that one of their hobbies
is running or cycling. And I ask them how
they do that, when do they fit that in and you get a
sense of their level of discipline because those things that they're even
excited about, they've had to schedule that in order to
make that a part of their daily or weekly
lifestyle. And that's the same thing they're scheduling in
something that they're probably going to be afraid of at certain times.
Maybe they're not afraid of a run 4 mile run, but
running 10 miles with some other people they're afraid of because
they Might not be as fast or they might have an outfit that's not as
cool as other people they're running with. I don't know what it is for them,
but it could trigger some fear. If they schedule it, you're less
likely to talk yourself out of it,
big time stuff. And if you schedule it, you are
less likely to be able to blame it on your
feelings. Because those feelings are connected
to our fears as well. Fear of change, fear of being judged, fear of not
performing up to to our standards, fear of letting ourselves down and having
to learn something new because we're not as good as we want to be
at something, but we're challenging ourselves to grow. That's
crucial. That's for me. I
like yoga and I do not like yoga. It's a love
hate relationship. And when I have it in my schedule and
I work out, sometimes after work and sometimes in the morning,
morning is ideal. But I see that yoga class in my schedule
and if it's after work, well,
I know that in my head I'm going to have all kinds
of different thoughts. You know, you don't have time for this, it's all
sweaty in there and you got other things you need to
get done this evening. It's not good to do yoga after
you eat dinner. I don't know the excuses are going to come,
but I also have things, this battle in my mind saying you're going to
feel great afterwards, you meet nice people there,
you're going to feel good physically. Tomorrow's going to be a better day.
And which one wins kind of depends on the day and it depends on the
consistency and it depends on whether I'm looking at that
schedule or not. But having it in that schedule makes me more likely to
actually go to a yoga class. And two a week is my goal.
It helps me to, if it's in the morning, get up on time because I'm
starting to think about that class the next day. You focus on the schedule in
advance. So principle number three related
to remembering that the
only way to confidence is through fear. Third principle is
that you want to remember how you will feel
after you, you face that scary thing in your life,
how you will feel after. And being able to grasp
that is going to motivate you to push through the fear. Because that reward
becomes bigger, it grows.
It's not nearly as
ambiguous because you remember I felt really great there
and I do that with my own business recently, over the last two years.
I didn't do this in the past, which is the partially Why I was
struggling. I had a lot of things that kept me and held me back from
growing. A lot of fear, basically. But recently I spend
more time focusing on the good things
as Decide youe Legacy grows that are gonna come about. I can hire
new people which can help them provide for their
families. I'll meet new people and I like people. I have more people
around and it's a more social environment. I meet new clients and I get to
see client successes. And that always feels really cool when they're excited about
the progress that they're making through coaching. I get
to increase revenue and then give pay raises
and bonuses and maybe even, well, I shouldn't say
maybe have a new office in the future that has
technology that I want and has. Not that I have
a great office now and have a great team now. So I'm not trying to
say I don't appreciate them by any means, but to grow
and provide better benefits and to
increase the reach the people we get to help. And I
feel it's like when I get that
positive feedback from clients, I feel like,
wow, this is our purpose. This is amazing. So that's so
encouraging. If I motivate, if I can focus
on how I'm going to feel, then it's not nearly as painful to
push through the fear. I mean, it still is, but it's worth it
because of all the potential benefits on the other side. And it may not go
well. It may not be exactly how I want it to be. In fact, it's
never gonna be perfect. It's always gonna have some messiness to it. Yet
I'm still gonna grow if I push through the fear, regardless of what that
outcome is. I recently had a call
to somebody that I was
thinking about the call and I was prepared for it, but actually
after it was done, I'm like, gosh, why did I say
that? You know, why didn't I ask these questions and why did I say that?
Because I don't know if I'll have a chance to interact with this person. It
was like a chance to talk to somebody
that I don't communicate with a lot. And I look back too,
and say I really wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be in the interaction.
And as I look back on it, reflecting now, it's kind of easy to
see I grew from that. I know right afterwards I just sat in my
chair for like three minutes before I went and talked to one of the people
on my team, trying to get some encouragement.
And I like every interaction to go well, don't we all? I mean, we all
want to have positive interactions, but it didn't go as well as I wanted it
to be, as well as I wanted it to go. But
I learned from it and it's helping me to grow. When you
focus on how you feel afterwards, you're
going to find that
the emotions you start to feel even then are going to be more empowering
as you focus on it. You can help yourself and you can own
your own emotional state. In fact,
it'll give you some sense of excitement. At least it does for me.
When I realize how I'm going to feel after I push through and have that
hard conversation. I find that
when and I do this with my team and we focus on our
10 year vision as a company, when we focus on
reaching these goals towards our 10 year vision,
when we take the time to start a meeting reflecting on
these aspects of the business, our values and our, our
aim, our mission, that is motivating not just to me,
but to the whole team. We're remembering why we do what we do.
And you can do that for yourself and you can do that and start training
yourself to do it consistently and you'll have more and more of this
DCG growth that I'm talking about here.
You talk about the successes that happen with your team. Again,
that's tapping into the motion, the emotion, so you can
motivate. As I've
learned from Jonathan Haight and Guy,
that is my coach as well, his name's Dan. We talk about
sometimes that we have our, this metaphor of a rider
on an elephant and then a path for the elephant, the rider on the
elephant, little guy, tiny guy, he's, he's the rational mind. He represents
the rational mind. The elephant represents the emotional mind. Our
amygdala, how fired up we can get when we're scared. We can just want to
run and that elephant's going to go wherever it wants to go. And the path
is environmental factors. You have influence over your rational
mind which can help the elephant and you have influence over by,
by tapping into the emotion, you can motivate the elephant and
then you can shape the path by having a schedule, you can shape the path
by having accountability. You can shape the path by getting training. You can shape the
path by remembering models that
keep you focused, by focusing on, you can shape the cognitive
mind, that writer, the rational mind, by getting more information, getting
factual information about the situation that can help you to see
that you can make it through this difficult situation because the facts are on your
Side Facts are not feelings. Facts are facts. They stand on
their own. Feelings can be based on facts and they can be based on lies.
They can be based on our past. We want to be able to be really
careful with that. I know a situation that
happened for me years ago when I was in
college is I liked this galaxy
and I didn't really know her. And so I convinced the pledges in the
fraternity to go on Valentine's Day and give her a rose from me.
And they did. You know, I was a junior and they were pledges
and so they went down to their Monday night dinner at the sorority. She
was in the DG fraternity. Sorority. I was in the Fidel
fraternity in University of Oregon. And they brought her this rose. And
then she came back. I was kind of terrified by it because I'd never done
something like this before. And the pledges came back and said, oh, she liked the
rose, you know, and the other girls liked the rose. And then
I was going to call this gal and back then we used the phone and
there was actually no cell phone. So we called the sorority house telephone
to connect with the girls in the sorority. So I
called that phone, tried to reach her and
I wasn't able to get through. And but
the interesting thing about that is it took me probably two
weeks to make that phone call. I picked up word that this gal
had a boyfriend. And I remember thinking, I'm not going to call her, I'm not
going to call her. Or I wanted to call her. I wanted. She seemed interested
and I don't know where. Her boyfriend wasn't at the school, he was in another
state. I remember clearly the guy was. Her boyfriend was in Nevada. I remember that.
But I remember just ruminating on this. I don't know if I can call, if
I should call. I can't call, I'm going to get rejected. And I waited
and waited and waited and missed an opportunity to connect with somebody. And
that's been my life in a number of situations, especially
regarding dating, regarding women. And I blame that on going to an all boys high
school. So especially where I just think and
think and think and it's misery. That's what
that's suffering right there. You're stuck. But then I
remember, even if I had this model on right now, I
would remember that, just making the call and asking her to go get
coffee and going and connecting with her. And eventually when I made the
call, she said she would go get coffee with me, but I never took her
up on it because I couldn't take this boyfriend thing out of my mind. Very
silly stuff. I shouldn't have taken it so seriously. But that
to me is an opportunity that I had to apply
and I could have applied DCG and grown, but I missed that opportunity.
Don't miss these opportunities you have in your life to grow because they're
there every day for you. So the only
way to confidence is pushing through fear.
Number one. First principle resolve to the fact that you will never
feel ready. Second principle schedule the fear
into your life. It's necessary to do so. And the third is to
remember how you will feel afterwards because that
will motivate you to to push through. So if you found this podcast
helpful, check out Shatterproof yourself. These are seven
small steps to a giant leap in your mental health. This course you purchase
and go through. There's a community that you can engage in. I had a live
Q and A today and I did a live coaching session today that was
super fun and I went through content Special content
just for these very special subscribers to the side youe
Legacy community. There's a. There's a manual that goes with it. This
is my best content worksheets I've been using with clients for
20 plus years and you have access to it.
Lifetime access to this content and it's one of the sections
is on owning your emotions which is what we're talking about today. So hit the
link. Check out Shatterproof. Seven small steps to
a giant leap in your mental health and the community
as well. There's no
positive change without a decision
to change. You decide your legacy. You make the
decision. Your legacy depends on you acting on
doing something. And nothing
will make my day better than knowing you have taken some action on
this content based on this content. Take action
and follow me. Subscribe
and leave a rating and review on Apple, Spotify wherever you get your
podcast content that helps it to grow organically. To decide
means that you are eliminating other options. Your legacy is
the impact that your life has on other people.
In closing, I want to close today the way I always do. Live the life
today that you want to be remembered for 10 years after you're gone.
You decide your legacy. Nobody else. I appreciate you
greatly and I'll see you next time.