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Are you ready to take the steps necessary to thrive? Join us every episode as host Adam Gragg discusses what is holding us back and how to move forward with purpose, along the way developing healthy relationships and navigating life transitions while overcoming fear, stress and anxiety. Adam is a family therapist, mental health professional and life coach helping individuals and organizations find the transformational clarity that unleashes hope. Live the life you want, the legacy you decide.
Ep125_Fear
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Adam Gragg: [00:00:00] So in the last episode of the Decide Your Legacy podcast, I talk about seven major reasons why you want to face your fears. You'll want to go and check that out. This episode today is on ~how to face your biggest fears. How to be, ~how to face your biggest fears. This is my passion. in life to help people find clarity so they can face their crap that they've been putting off so they're not stuck and they can live their [00:01:00] life.
If you know my story, you know I put off stuff that happened when I was a kid until my 40s to actually face that stuff. A book that inspired me greatly is In my early twenties, when I was 20 years old, it was called Fear the Fear and Do It Anyway. Now, I've read that book since then. There's some stuff I don't agree with, but a lot of it I do.
~And it's mainly that you got to face your stuff and deal with it. ~This is how I dealt with my fear of flying. This is how I dealt with a lot of fears that I've had to face in my life. I want you today to learn the truths about facing your fears that'll change your life. So this is episode 125 of the Decide Your Legacy podcast.
Today's episode is called How to Face Your Fears. I'm your host, Adam Gragg. I'm a coach and a content creator, a speaker. I help people find clarity to face their fears so they can live their legacy. I talk about stuff I struggle with myself, do not have it all figured out. I'm a fellow traveler. I want to share something uncomfortable that I've done because it'll help you to do uncomfortable things too. And I don't believe that [00:02:00] there's anything more important to your mental health than doing scary stuff, facing your biggest fears. So what I did yesterday, I did something small, not a huge deal, but I went to a standup paddleboard class at Santa Fe Lake, a lake near where I live.
And I actually took my dog on the paddleboard at the end of the, at the end of the class as well and got a cool picture, but it was tough. I was scared, you know, doing yoga on a paddleboard, not something that sounds easy, right? So this is the podcast that you do not just listen to.
So this means you do some uncomfortable things as well. And I want to start off this episode with you thinking of something that you're putting off that you're afraid of. What is it? Is it organizing your finances? Is it ~What are you putting off ~being assertive with your boss, being assertive with your friends, with your family?
What is it that you're putting off? And you're going to know because when you wake up in the morning, you have this glaring intuitive issue that is saying face me, deal with me, address me. It's there. But what I have found is [00:03:00] that it is very easy to put off ~those address, ~those core issues that pop up by avoidance tactics, by making excuses as to why I can't do it.
I don't have enough time. I don't have enough money. It won't make a difference. It won't help when you don't face it and you keep putting it off. In fact, it will compound because that obstacle, that phobia, that fear that you know is there is not going to go away until we actually face it. The really exciting thing about it is once you actually do face it, immediately it starts to dissipate.
~ One of that, ~if I wake up and I'm afraid to organize my finances, which is a major fear for a lot of people, and I decide that I'm going to avoid it all day and not think about it, not talk about it, not get any kind of help with it, not address it, not open my mail, not do anything to address the issue.
That fear is going to actually grow and compound. We may feel like it's been numbed because we have self medicated through work or distraction or addiction, whatever it may be to keep us not thinking about that financial issue or that career issue that we're not wanting to [00:04:00] face. And then once we actually do take a step to ask for help or read a book or do something productive, it's going to start decreasing right away.
And key thing to remember is something that's scary for you may not be scary to somebody else because they have gone through the process of committing and taking a step towards courage and building confidence and then building competency and they've made progress based on the fact that they stepped out.
~So let's go ahead and jump in. ~So the first truth to keep in mind when it comes to facing your fear, the first step that you'd want to take is to count the cost. So initially you're going to ~identify, which by the way I was challenging you to do just a second ago, is ~identify one thing you're putting off and then say, what am I actually afraid is going to happen if this fear comes to reality?
So if I open my mail and I start to really take a clear look at my financial situation or my work situation or my career situation or relationship situation, what are you afraid is going to happen? That specific issue isn't resolved. And that starts the process of just dealing with reality. If [00:05:00] I don't deal with my financial condition, I'll end up in a bigger mess than I'm in right now.
If I don't deal with my career situation, I'll end up in a bigger negative, you know, depressed situation than I'm actually in now. And so you start to count the cost and the cost could be that you lose money. You lose opportunity. You are not helping other people and you know you can. Your health is deteriorating because you're not facing that fear with your health.
Relationships are deteriorating your marriage, your relationship with your grown kids, your business could fail. And then the people who work for your business could lose their job. If you don't step out and face that situation, I have fear related to marketing and sales. I'm not, ~for one, I'm not great at it.~
~I've told myself that I'm ~great at it. I'm getting better at it. I have fear that I'm going to fail in many ways, in many parts of my life, I want you to think about those things for you and then actually give yourself a reality check. So if you don't face this specific issue, this is going to motivate you.
That's why I'm sharing this. ~It's one of the, ~it's the first step because it's going to motivate you to say, I don't want to [00:06:00] deal with that thing happening that's very negative in my life if I keep avoiding this. I don't want that. ~I definitely don't want that. It's, ~it's like when you go to the doctor and the doctor says, you have high blood pressure and your cholesterol is high and you need to stop eating.
This stuff that you're eating and you need to exercise consistently to change this negative health pattern that you started to build in your life, or you have hypertension because you're not dealing with stress in your life. And if you don't change this, there's going to be serious consequences. That's counting the cost.
You're saying, here's what's going to happen if I don't ~do with this. ~deal with this specific issue. So ~if you don't make, for me, ~if I don't make the calls to sell this business service that I ~do believe in, highly ~believe in, if I don't do it, it's going to have a negative impact on my family, my financial condition, and most of all, I won't be able to help people the way I want to help people.
If I don't go ahead and deal with my health situation and go to the gym, ~that's not me specifically, ~that I'm going to have these consequences where I won't be able to ~pay, play, and ~support my family and be there for them in the future. An action you can take to count the cost is to spread out your time horizon.
So if you have [00:07:00] a time horizon that is only a year, let's say, ~it may not be, ~or a month, let's say, ~so you only think about a month in the future, ~well that is not going to be motivating you to count the cost nearly as much as if you spread the time horizon out to 10 years. Because if you neglect your health today, well with a 10 year time horizon and you let that compound, you can start to grasp the fact, it starts to do this mindset trick on you where you start to see how damaging it's going to be 10 years from now as you have neglected your health consistently.
Or if you've neglected your professional development consistently and you do it for just a month or two, it may not have that big of a consequence. But if you do that for 10 years or 25 years, it's going to have a significant consequence. You're going to be behind professionally. You're not going to have grown.
And the reverse is true. That if you expand your time horizon, what you do now isn't nearly as impactful. So I had somebody once tell me that they had lost their first job, unfortunate circumstances. I don't think they were treated fairly. I think it was an unprofessional situation, ~but I still think it happened.~
I mean, it did happen. That's the [00:08:00] reality. ~And they probably, ~and they actually would admit that they did some things that weren't great, not unethical, or ~not ~Immoral, but they ~didn't handle ~weren't as assertive as they could have been. And when they have a time horizon of 25 years, it's not nearly as impactful to lose your job as if your time horizon is short, like a year, because you're thinking that ~this failure or whatever you want to just ~this failure.
I mean, I've had failures. That's a failure when it may not be completely. Something they could have controlled, but it's still a failure. They have 100 percent ownership of how they handle it ~today ~moving forward. That's a healthy thing, but that expanded time horizon makes it not nearly as impactful because they know they can bounce back.
It's just, it's 25 years. You know, one lost job over a 25 year period is not nearly as big of a deal. So you count the cost by expanding your time horizon, knowing it's going to be a big deal if you neglect it. That's the first step facing your biggest fears in life. The second step, the truth is to see.
the potential gain in this situation. See the opportunity ahead. If you fail, this is again a ~mindset shift. ~mindset shift. So if I do this thing that I [00:09:00] face, and I know when I wake up in the morning that I keep putting off growing professionally or taking that risk, and I know it's just glaring at me, it's telling me that I don't want to get to the point at the end of my life where I haven't taken that risk.
striven. I haven't, I haven't started that business or I haven't gone to the next level of my career. I haven't gone to the next level with my physical health or my relationships and my friendships or spiritually. And I don't want to die with that regret there, but you keep putting it off. Well, when you make the shift to saying that, if I do this thing, and I'm going to grow so much, even if it fails, then it will motivate you to take that leap and do that next right thing.
In fact, it won't be, in my view, it doesn't keep coming up every morning. Do this. Engage this. opportunity unless it's something that is on your heart that is bigger than you. ~It's like, ~it's a God given, God inspired, help other [00:10:00] people make the world a better place thing that you can't let go of. ~And when you When you, ~and I don't want you to let go of it because that to me is a great blessing.
There's reasons why fear and angst and these things resurfacing happen again and again and again because it's bigger than you. It's more important than you. It's not about you. ~It's ~the fear is reminding you to face this specific issue in your life. That's different than anxiety. Anxiety is not based on reality.
Anxiety is based on things that are not going to actually happen. We're manufacturing reality. This fear that rises up is based on reality that we know we need to address it. And it's so easy to put it off. So, when you make consistent excuses, I would say that you wake up and you know you need to deal with your health.
But you keep putting it off and making excuses. I don't have time. I can't do that. It won't actually help. And then what I find with people like this is they will find other things to worry about. So they'll go home and neglect their health and not eat healthy and not [00:11:00] get enough sleep and not get to the gym.
And then they'll start worrying about all these things that are out of their control because they don't really want to go through the pain of getting healthy and facing the core issue that they need to deal with. And they know the weight, and they know how significant it is, but instead, they get caught up in politics and drama and their kid's school teacher and some other issue in their life that really doesn't have a whole lot to do with things that they have influence over.
And that's where they get stuck. Consumed a church issue, a family issue, their in laws, I don't know what it might be for you, but that's worry, and that's anxiety, and that's keeping you from focusing on what is the most important thing. Those distractions are incredibly tempting. It's the shiny object that can take you away from facing that biggest fear in your life. You avoid the shiny object by realizing that this tremendous opportunity by getting healthy or facing this biggest fear is right there in front of you. Yesterday, when I was out at that paddleboard yoga class at the lake, I saw somebody ~on their yoga, board, I mean, sorry, ~on their paddle [00:12:00] board, doing these handstands in more difficult yoga positions than I was willing to challenge myself to do at first.
And I didn't challenge myself as much as they did, but what I noticed is I was embarrassed for them because they kept falling in the water. And this is deep water. They have to climb back up ~on their yoga, ~on their paddle board after they fall in. And in my head, I was saying, I don't want to do that.
There are about 10, 12 people in this class. I don't want to do that. But then another part of me said, Adam, yeah. They're being braver than you are. And the only reason they've gotten to be better at yoga is because they've challenged themselves to do positions that are more difficult. And you know what?
You should be falling in the water right now because you're not challenging yourself. And then I immediately fell in the water because I challenged myself to do something that was more challenging. I didn't fall nearly as much as they did because I didn't push myself as hard, but we want to fall more often.
And if we see the gain, cause that to me is how the only way I'm going to get better. at yoga is because I'm going to fail more. I'm going to fall in the water more [00:13:00] often, and that will make you more attractive to other people because we're attracted to people who do things where they're willing to fail and make mistakes and be embarrassed because they're not focusing on themselves, but they keep getting back up.
That's the most attractive person you'll ever meet. They do the next right thing to challenge themselves. It doesn't go well, and then they get back up again. That's incredibly challenging and incredibly inspiring and that's focusing on the gain. How do you work on this? Well, one thing you can do is you can check out this list that I created in the post that I wrote recently.
It's on facing your fears and it's called 27 Scary Actions That You Can Take and you can start by seeing how you will benefit, because the articles on the benefits of facing your fear, you'll see that if you do the next little thing, it's going to start building that muscle in you to face the next fear, and the next fear, and the next fear.
And it'll start helping you remember that I'm going to gain something from facing this emotional fear, regardless of the outcome, [00:14:00] whether I'm embarrassed, I feel rejected, I feel like a failure, that emotion is not going to last very long as you continue to face your fears, because you're growing in the process.
So the second truth is to see the opportunity, see the gain. So if you found this Decide Your Legacy podcast helpful, you're going to want to check out the last one because it's on the same topic of facing your fears. It's on seven reasons why, but you're also going to want to hit the link to shatterproof yourself.
These are seven small steps to a giant leap in your mental health. Putting your attention into yourself. The first section of Shatterproof is on clarifying your vision. It's going to inspire you to move forward. And this is a process that I take my clients through. It's one that I go through myself. It's a repeatable cycle and it's an orderly process.
Three keys. To this process or gaining information, you're going to get inspiration and then you're going to be inspired to take action. Each of the seven [00:15:00] steps has specific actions you can take and journaling questions you can answer. It's quick, it's brief, and you can get it through the Decide Your Legacy app, which is available for you to download for free right ~in the, ~in the Apple store.
Pretty exciting The course is on the app. Very cool. And there's some bonus things on the app for you as well. So the third step, the third thing to do to face your biggest fears is to tap into your strengths. One of my clients was recently telling me about his beer making process in his basement, and he's got three beers on tap and he invites his buddies over.
to drink this fresh beer. He's got a really cool setup in his basement. And we, in this situation, when we are facing our biggest fear, we have ~this, ~these strengths on tap. You know, ~we can, ~we can open the tap and let them come out. And the reason I know this is because You have had situations in your past where you have [00:16:00] grown by facing things that are hard in your life.
So if you're listening, has there ever been a time when you've made 10 times less money than you make now? Has there been a time when you're 10 times less apt with your phone or technology than you are today? And you're hopefully able to say yes to one of those questions there, where you're ten times better today with utilizing technology than you were ten years ago, ~or ten, ~or five years ago, or three days ago.
It doesn't matter what the time frame was, but you were ten times worse at it than you are today. Well, the reason is, is because you have done some things that you were not competent. You didn't feel a sense of competency. You didn't feel confident navigating on your phone at first, but you decided to do it.
And then you built confidence to navigate and to utilize your phone camera. ~Over time, as you practice with it, and that's what will happen to you today. ~You can see that you've gotten much, much better at things by engaging strengths that you have. You may have a strength, a unique strength to you, where you're [00:17:00] friendly or you're analytical or you learn quickly.
Or you're social or you see opportunities to help other people. You see ways to encourage people that other people wouldn't see. You are an engineer. Maybe you're an accountant and you're very good with numbers and you have natural strengths that from my perspective are given to you that make you unique.
They don't make you better than anybody else. They make you different than other people. And when you recognize these strengths, then you can access them as you face the fears that you're going to face because you're scared. Nobody goes into something initially with confidence. I find that people want confidence up front before actually doing that scary thing, but they're cheating.
~They're cheating. ~Because if you wait until you have confidence, you'll never do anything that stretches you to grow. Which, those are the types of people that I want around me. Consistently are those that are willing to step into courage, knowing that on the other side is growth, but initially they're going to feel insecure.
You feel [00:18:00] insecure because you don't have the confidence and competence yet to do that thing that you want to learn how to do, yet you still want to learn how to do it. So you ~step into the courage that's necessary for you to ~step into the courage, but you know that you have the strengths to get through it.
You have these gifts. I want you to start focusing on the fact that you have strengths that you can access. Because that'll help you to get to the place where you're willing to jump into something that is scary because you know that you've gotten through stuff in the past and you can get through it again.
You have resources around you and some of those may be your good friends and those are a great resource for you to make it through to the other side. And then you'll discover as well that much of what you feared ~is actually true. ~didn't come to reality because you're getting new evidence that you have the ability to handle the situation and then ~your courage, courage, you aren't, it isn't, ~you don't need as much courage the next time to be in that situation because you've faced it before and you see it.
So an example for me is that I was absolutely positively terrified of public speaking. I have a speaking event tomorrow [00:19:00] actually at 1:30 where I'm~ I'm going to talk about ~I'm going to talk about mental health with a team at a company. And I remember where I was so scared that I would lose sleep and I'd lose my appetite and I would get, I would be dysfunctional to the point where I would, I was so stuck in my head with my anxiety about public speaking that I couldn't.
Even I, it was just bad. Okay. So, and I have issues with anxiety, have in the past. It's much better now because I'm practicing more of the tools that I teach, but I remember how incredibly immobilizing it was, but I was not a great public speaker then. I'm 10 times better than I was then, but how did I get to the point where I'm 10 times better?
As I, I learned to write out my notes and I learned to create PowerPoint slides and I learned to ask friends for feedback. I learned to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, because rehearsal is a tremendous blessing for somebody who gets in front of other people speaking. It's a chance for you to practice. It's still hard.
It is work, but it's [00:20:00] tremendously helpful in the whole process. But I only got there because I had to access some strengths that I had available to me and I can access them again right now. And that's what you want to do. So let's go ahead and review. First thing you want to do, first step towards facing your biggest fears is to go ahead and count the cost of not facing them.
What are you going to lose in the process? That's going to cause you to be fearful and that fear is good because it's showing you what you can lose if you don't face this very important issue in your life. The second step is to see the opportunity, the gain, the growth, the potential in facing this situation.
It may be uncomfortable, it may not go as if you wanted it to go, The way you want it to go, but you're going to grow, which is going to motivate you to step into it, to see the blessings that are going to come on the other side of stepping into that fearful situation, whatever you're afraid of. And the third is you're going to tap into your strengths.
You're going to open up the tap. On the keg and you're going to pour out the strengths that you know, they're in there. They are [00:21:00] been accessed before because you see the successes in your past when you've done the scary stuff and faced it and you can do it again. It's there for you to check out. Check out the article on seven benefits, major benefits to facing your fears for inspiration ~and check out the last podcast.~
And remember that 20 percent of transformational change or less. is insight. You're gaining insight and information today. 80%, and I can't share this strongly enough, is action. What action are you going to take? Are you going to put on your running shoes and go to the gym and work out? Or are you going to buy some nice running shoes and look at how nice they look with your work clothes and never actually get to the gym. An okay plan that you act on is a hundred times better than a great plan that you do nothing with. What resonated with you most today? By the end of today, apply something you learned, and if you really want it to stick, talk to somebody else about that concept.
I'm going to sign off the way I always do. Make it your [00:22:00] mission to live the life now 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.