Lessons - Transform Your Fear Into Your Greatest Advantage | Rob Dial - Mindset Coach & Podcast Host

In this Lessons episode, discover how to separate real fear from imagined fear and take control of your mindset. Learn why most fears, like rejection or failure, don't exist outside your mind. Learn how to use fear as a tool instead of a barrier, and learn how understanding your fear can help you make better life and career decisions. I think that's incredible and it's very impressive that you discovered that on your own because that inflection point where you took a look at your boss's job and you're like, my god, I don't want to be my boss. I really just don't want to be my boss, so I better figure my shit out. I think a lot of people have that feeling, but very few take action on that feeling. Now, I would say that this audience, I don't want to get it twisted. This audience is very entrepreneurial, so a lot of people in this audience have taken action. But sometimes they've taken action and they go back to their job or they take action, they're not sure if it's the right action or they take action towards one business and they start five more because they're almost like over indexing on taking action. So it's still a very messy road. It doesn't matter how you do it or they just don't take action at all. So what is the what is the mental framework or the mental model when you're at this inflection point in your life, you see your future, you're not happy with it. Obviously, you're scared. You speak about fear a lot. There's a lot of fear inside and that can either stop you from taking action or it can prompt you to take incorrect action. How do you manage fear and sort of use it as a tool to move in the direction that you should be moving? Yeah, good question. So I love fear and thinking about it. I don't love the feeling of it, but I love the way it manifests in human's lives. Fear at its simplest form is just a defense mechanism. That's all that it is. It's trying to protect you. And so if it's like, hey, you should, if I have this feeling, if I should leave my job and that is me thinking that and that's like my gut feeling, but my brain pops in is like, hey, but how are you going to pay the bills? That is just at at its at its core. If you look at nasa's hierarchy of needs, security is the number one thing. That is what we're looking for. And so it's like, okay, if I lose my job or if I leave my job and I start growing my own business, what if I can't pay my bills, what if I can't feed my family? Like, that is like at the root of what we are as humans, like, we need that security before we can do anything else as far as sex, self actualization goes. On the other side of that, and I'll answer at how it works in the human brain. And this is, I wrote, I've an entire chapter on fear in my book that was really open to me for when I came across and started realizing this stuff. And I'll tell you that actually happened in my life with the leaving of it, leaving a job, doing what I do now all of that. So I had a friend that was in his name is Chad, and his name is Chad. He's still alive. So it's not West Chad. Chad is still alive. So Chad and I were having a conversation years ago. And he, um, he's a very, uh, alternative lifestyle post type type person. So he went down and he lived with a native Brazilian tribe in the middle of nowhere. And when I say native Brazilian, I mean that he flew down to Brazil, he got on a boat and it took two days of sleeping overnight to finally get to this tribe. There's no roads. There's no, that's the only way he can get to this tribe. You got to take, take a, you know, go down the Amazon, all that to get there. So he, he lives with them. So like, Chad, Chad's done for sure. Like, hi, a wasca. He's a sad son. It's how we got there. Right. That's what I mean by alternative lifestyle. He's awesome. Just like any, I have no, one of one of the most amazing humans alive too. Like just calming peaceful presence when you're in this style. He's also like 40 pounds of muscle more than I am in the same size of me. Right. So, uh, but amazing human. And he went down there and he lived with them. And to the point where he like lived in TPs, he had to walk around the machete. Uh, they hunted anacondas. And he said, he said, um, he said, if a jaguar sees you, it's already too late because it's now allowing it to, it's now allowing you to see it because it's like an attack you like that's there. It's, it's fear of safety all the time. And he said, he said what's really interesting is none of these people were depressed because they don't have time to think about depression. It's kind of like there's a phrase that says like one of the, the greatest faults that we have as human is having enough time to sit around and ask myself like am I happy. Like there's a lot of people who don't even, they can't even think am I happy because they're just worried about survival. And so then we started talking about the, the primal fears that exist when you live in the Amazon, like primal is like, and then there's, and then so we started talking about, well, okay, we don't really have primal fear. So what do we have. And we're like, we have basically intellectual fears. So like, then in my book, I split up of two different types of fears. So a primal fear, the way I describe it, and the way that we still think about it in our head. Unless we constantly bring to the service and now she think about it is a primal fear means that there's, there's physical pain or there's death that's potentially attached to it. Right. That's why people have a fear of heights. That's why they have the fear of spiders. That's why people, you know, if you're walking through and you hear a loud noise in the jungle, you're getting it's, there's a primal fear. On the other side of that are intellectual fears and an intellectual fear could be because of the fact that we don't live in the middle of the jungle anymore. Our brain creates all of these other fears. The amygdala still exists inside of our brain. So it's still always creating these fears. So an intellectual fear be like, fear of other people's opinions, the fear of rejection, the fear of failure, the fear of success. And the way that you can distinguish the two of them is if you ask yourself, this fear, is it going to kill me and does it exist in reality? Like if you look at the fear of rejection, does it exist in reality? Is it tangible? Can you hold it physically? You can't. What does it exist? It exists in your mind, which means that you're making it up. You're literally making it up. And I remember I was, as I was writing the book, I was listening to a lot of, I was listening to everything I possibly could as I was writing it. I think it was Saad Guru that I was listening to and he was talking about fear and how we make up all of these fears. And he said, and this is what I write about in the book is, is okay, now that I've identified my fear of success, my fear of failure, my fear of rejection, my fear of other people's opinions, how do I overcome it? And the answer is you can't overcome something that doesn't exist because it doesn't actually exist. And so we're basically waking up in the morning. We're creating the Boogeyman, which is these intellectual fears that don't exist in reality. And instead of taking action on the life that we want, what are we doing? We're fighting the Boogeyman and wasting our energy and fighting the Boogeyman all day long, first just taking action towards the thing that we want. Now how did it manifest in my life? I'll tell you like, I almost went back to working for somebody else. So I left my job. It was like right before, so it was, um, would have been October of 2015. So yeah, nine years ago at this point. It was October of 2015. And I was like, I left and I was full of fear because like we were talking about before we started podcasting. There was no money in podcasting nine and a half years ago. There was none. Right. There was no sponsors. People didn't even know how to listen to podcasts. And so, um, so there was no money. And so I was, I was kind of like jumping off, but in my heart, like it felt like this is the thing I'm supposed to do. But as soon as the paycheck stopped coming in, I just had an, I bought a new house like four or five months before in July. And I had to still pay for myself and pay for my food and pay for my car payments and all of this. And I went through my first month of just not having money coming in and paying bills from my savings and it coming out, I started getting like really, really full of fear. And I believe that the universe, God, life, whatever you believe in is always speaking to us. We just have to be quite enough to listen to it. And I had this feeling of like, maybe I should go back and work for someone else. Maybe I should like maybe I should just go back on on terrified. I'm full of so much fear. Then I went back home to Florida. I live in Texas. Now when back home to Florida and my sister. Just comes up to me and she's like, hey, have you ever seen this box of dad's stuff? And my father had died in 2001. He was an alcoholic, you know, passed away when I was 15. And so what are we talking? That's 14 years before he had passed away. She's like, have you ever seen this box of dad's stuff? And I was like, no, and it was like old t-shirt of his, his glasses, his watch. And then there were letters. My father was in jail for a little while and he used to write his letters. And I was reading these letters. And the very last sentence of one of them was. It was a letter to my sister on a 19th birthday. The very last sentence was, I hope you live your life with courage, love and laughter. And then it said, and then it had like courage and then it had a little asterisk next to the word courage. And then down below it had courage is not the absence of fear. It is deciding that you are going to move forward in spite of it. And I read it and it was this weird like the universe like warped. And I was like, oh my god, I think my dad wrote this for me. The universe was speaking through my dad to my sister for me to find this in this moment right now. And I was like, this is the universe telling me that I have to do this. Like I have to go forward with it. Like I have to burn the ships. Like there has to be, you know, as a great philosopher, Marshall Mather says success is my only motherfucking option. Failures not. That's what I have to think about with this thing. I have to do this. And the universe will support me. And I have to trust. I was like, what do I need to do? And I was like, I need to get this tattooed on me. Like I need to just burn the ships. And so, literally, my dad's handwriting is on the inside. It says, live your life with courage, love and laughter on the inner arm. This is his handwriting blown up in my arm. Very first tattoo that I ever got and only have two. The only other one that I have is the Roman numo for 10,000 for the 10,000 hour rule. And so for me, I always recommend that people make a decision and they just go, will you fear the fear? Absolutely every single day. But it's not about not feeling feeling any fear. It's about feeling the fear. Taking it, understanding is trying to protect you, but deciding to move forward anyways. And so I think that's the biggest piece of it. Now, if somebody's like, I want to quit my job and started company, I don't think you should just leave like I did. I actually recommend you make a transition plan, like make a year long transition plan, make it to your transition plan. Well, you're going to be out. You're going to save up and you're going to start building money and decide the side business on the side on the weekends. So that therefore, the fear starts to go away because the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy needs is taking care of which is my safety. I can pay my bill. So now I can leave my job. And I think that when you look at fear that way and act in spite of it, fear no longer fogs your judgment. Because like I mentioned, like yes, there's sort of like two components to what you're talking about right now. There is acting in spite of fear, but then there's also de-risking the opportunity so that you move forward regardless. When you look at, when you look at sort of like the two components, the two components that I just discussed, like de-risking versus acting in spite of fear. How much do you think you should de-risk an opportunity versus jumping in and figuring it out and burning the boats? Because you can de-risk an opportunity. Is de-risking an opportunity ever just almost like an excuse to take massive action? I guess the question is like how do you understand when's that what's that point where you do have to dive in? I think it depends on the person, right? Like some people are I am a type of person where I will take risk, but they're very calculator risks. My best friend, he will take very uncalculated risks. He has no problem with it. I don't even like gambling. He loves gambling. So I think it depends on the person. Some people that are very risk adverse and some people that don't care about risk. So I think it depends on the person. For me, I'm in between where I want to make sure that what I'm stepping into is the correct thing. For me, I'm very logical in the way that I think. And then at the same time, I want to de-risk it as much as possible so that therefore I'm good to take action on this thing. If it's something for like where we're talking about a very serious life event that someone's moving into where they're wanting to start a business, I am a really big believer in going with your gut feeling with stuff. And then people ask like, well, how do you find your gut feeling? What is all of that? I think your gut feeling is a blend of intuition and also experience. And so, you know, like I have a friend that gave me a great example is like, you should definitely go with your gut feeling if you're a pilot that has 40,000 hours in a plane and you hear a noise that you've never heard before. It's like, okay, there's something wrong. I'm going to go with my gut feeling. If it's your first flight and you're just soloing for the first time ever, there might be as noise you've never heard before because you've only got 40 hours under your belt. There's a big difference between the two. And so I think it's an intuition is a gut feeling, but it's also a little bit of a blend of experience as well. So for me, like it was a little bit easier to jump off and grow a business because I grown businesses before in the past that failed. And that's why there's a lot of fear behind them. And then I went into corporate as well. And so I think more than they else, I think it depends on the person and how risk adverse they are. But I do think that it is somebody's runway of how long they have to mess up will be longer the more that they can de-risk the situation, which could be, I have, you know, $40,000 saved up. I'm good for the next year of bills. I can put everything into it. So I think it depends on the person. But I also think that you should try to de-risk it as much as you possibly can or create the longest runway that you possibly can when you're making a big life adjustment. Thanks for tuning in. 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