Step 2 – Approach vs. Avoidance

The second step to creating unstoppable courage is something I call “approach versus avoidance.”

In this step, you start approaching and stop avoiding. It’s that simple. If you can make this one fundamental shift in your life, it will transform and more rapidly than you can imagine.

For me, this shift started when I read the powerful book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, by Susan Jeffers. In it, she confirms my previous statement that everyone feels fear.

Even the people you see who look confident in the present moment have felt fear in the past ... and they probably continue to feel fear, but they’ve learned to not let it hold them back.

They feel the fear and they do it anyway.

You must approach the things you’re afraid of, notice your patterns of avoidance, and make a conscious choice to move forward.

Start by assessing what scares you. Maybe it’s asking someone out on a date; maybe it’s being assertive; maybe it’s saying hi to people; maybe it’s getting into some minor conflict. Whatever it is, you must develop the ability to approach it.

Almost anything that’s worth having in life – things that will inspire or fulfill you – will be outside of your comfort zone: excitement, passion, fulfillment, satisfaction, love, success, money ... attaining whatever you want probably involves some action that lies outside of your comfort zone. When you move outside of your comfort zone, you’re going to feel fear. The only way to really shift you stance is to start approaching the things that scare you.

There was a recent experiment done with rats that highlights this pattern of avoidance. The setup was to put a rat into a little box adjacent to another box with a swinging door between them. During the experiment, they beamed a little red light on the wall, followed immediately by blasting a horrible screeching sound.

The rat, of course, becomes disturbed by the sound and freaks out. As the rat scrapes at the walls trying to find a way out, he comes upon the swinging door and finds his way into the other room – the “safe” room. Once he makes it into the safe room, they turn the sound off.

After repeating this process a few times, the rat learns pretty quickly that he has to get out of the terrible room and into the safe room. Soon enough, the red light alone is enough to trigger his escape through the white door. His mind has already made the association: Red light = Bad; White door = Good. He knows that he does not want pain, so he escapes at the first sign of impending discomfort. In the safe room he can avoid the pain.

There’s another fascinating element to this experiment, though:

After conditioning the rat, they decided to see how long it would take to “un-condition him;” to unlearn his association of the red light with the frightening sound. They put him back into the first room and flashed the red light, but this time through, they never blasted any noise. Do you know how long it took the rat to realize that there was no longer any threat from the red light? It never did.

He was never able to be reconditioned because every time he saw the red light, he would run away in fear so quickly that he was never around to see what was actually happening and learn the new outcome.

The same thing happens with situations that scare us as human beings. We associate certain scenarios with equitable moments from our past or from our childhood, and even though we might be in a completely different situation at this point in our lives, we jump in fear and disappear into our “safe rooms” before we have a chance to learn that a new outcome might be possible.

All we can be sure of is that we don’t want to experience that pain that we remember from before.

Taking this chance equals rejection, equals terrible pain, so I’m going to avoid that.

Great ... you move along in your life, you try to avoid that scenario, and you survive. You’re not happy, but you’re surviving.

Unfortunately, this is a learned behavior as well, and it can develop into a pattern. As you proceed with your life, you notice that this avoidance technique keeps you pain free, so you keep using it. You accumulate all of these red lights associated with horrible pain and the things that frighten you, and you never stay in the room long enough to see what actually happens. That’s no good.

Staying in the room is the only way to decondition your fear. You have to stay in the room and see what happens. You talk to that woman, ask her out and see what happens; you speak in front of a group of people and see what happens; you become assertive with your supervisor and see what happens ... in the real world, as an adult.

You have to remember that whenever you were conditioned by your fear, you were probably young, and you probably didn’t have the resources to handle what was happening ... but now you do. You’re going to have to stop running away when you see the red light and start moving toward the things that scare you.

So, how do we do this? One of the best ways is to make a list. What are ten things that I avoid because they scare me?

Be careful not to choose things that you avoid because they’re annoying. I avoid mowing my lawn, but it’s not because I am deeply afraid of it; I just really don’t like it and I’d rather pay someone else to do it.

Also, don’t assume that you’re avoiding something just because you don’t like it. For many years, I told myself that dancing was stupid and that I didn’t like it. That was bullshit. The reality was that I was terrified to dance, and I thought that everyone was going to judge me.

These are the types of things we need to face head on.

Make a list of 10 things that you’re avoiding right now because of fear. In fact, turn away from your computer screen and make that list now. If you tell yourself that you’ll make your avoidance list later, then you will avoid making your avoidance list. Some part of you will realize that making the list will require action, and that is scary.

There’s a part of us that doesn’t want to do this stuff. There’s a part of us that wants to be small and safe and not make waves.

That’s not the part of your being from which you want to live your life. That’s not the part of you that knows courage and determination and a purpose in life. It’s not the part of you that is going to help you step outside of your comfort zone.

By now, you should have paused your reading to make your list, so you should know at least ten things that you’re avoiding. What I’d like you to do is quickly go through it and rate each thing on a scale from 1-10, 1 signifying extremely low anxiety, and 10 denoting absolute terror.

Now, pick the lowest level item on your list – something that’s a level one to four on the fear scale – and do it. Do it now. Do it today. Do it tomorrow. Do it as soon as you possibly can.

Feel the fear and do it anyway. We’re going to learn some courage generating techniques and we’re going to learn how to break those patterns soon, but the first thing you have to do is pick your first mission; which item on your list are you going to do today?

Don’t worry about the things that are up in the eight to ten range. Don’t pick a thing that’s a ten for now. As you build the muscle of courage – if you start doing the things that are fours, fives and sixes, and you do them a number of times – all of a sudden the things that were tens start to look a little less intimidating.

I have one guy who rates things using absurd numbers: If I ask him how anxious something makes him on a scale of one to ten, he’ll say, “Fifty.” If I inform him that he seems to have missed the understanding of the scale – that it doesn't go to 50 – he’ll just repeat, "Fifty."

Don’t worry about the tens (or the fifties) at first. Stick with the fives and sixes for a bit. You’ll find that your entire list will start to reduce a little bit on the scale. All of a sudden the thing that was a ten becomes an eight or a nine.

Every time you take action, remember the rat and the swinging door. See that red light, and force yourself to stick around and find out that what happens. You will almost certainly find that whatever happens is not nearly as bad as you thought it would be.

You’ve got to realize that all the horror you prepare yourself for is not actually going to happen. Once you do that and you see through those fears, your courage will explode. You won’t be dealing with overwhelming fears anymore ... you’ll be dealing with minor challenges; things you will be able to plow through with ease.

Pick one item from your list and do it today! Once you do, you’ll be ready to tackle the third step to creating unstoppable courage.