Mind Over Fear: How To Squash Your Fears, Overcome Anxiety, and Boost Your Self-Esteem In Just 30 Days (7 page)
Authors: Victor L. Fox
Well, the same thing applies to everything else. Your ability to focus can produce unbelievable results. Imagine that your mind is like the sun, and your ability focus is the magnifying glass. If you properly use your mind and your ability to focus, you can create incredible results.
In fact, the reticular activating (RAS) part of your brain is like a heat seeking missile. It picks out information from your environment and brings it to your attention.
To give you a quick example of how this works, let’s play a quick color game:
1. Take approximately thirty seconds to look around yourself and try to notice everything that is red. (Do this before reading step 2 below.)
2. Now, let me ask you a quick question. How many things did you see that were
blue
?
This silly little color game provides a clear example of how your brain filters out everything that’s not important. While looking for reds, did you see any other colors? Of course you did. Your eyes definitely saw things that were blue, but your brain didn’t register any of it because it received specific instructions not to focus on anything except the color red. This is all done using the power of focus.
Being able to shift your focus on command is one of the best ways to build self-confidence. Remember a time when you did something wrong, or maybe faced a really painful failure? Remember how you kept dwelling on it for hours, days, or even weeks maybe? It wasn’t until after a significant amount of time passed before you stopped focusing on this experience. The only reason we feel these painful emotions for a while is because we subconsciously keep rerunning the painful experience in our minds over and over again. But how much easier would your life be if you could just “flip a switch” and feel totally different about yourself and the situation instantly? If you answered, “a lot easier” then you are absolutely right!
If you want to learn how to quickly and efficiently shift your focus from one thing to another, you have to use…
The Power Of Questions:
In order to instantly shift your focus form one thing to another you must learn to properly use the power of asking a better question.
Whether you are aware of it or not, your brain is always asking and answering questions on a subconscious level. In fact, if you have to stop and think about whether what you just read is true or not, you proved my point because it means that you asked yourself something like, “do I always ask myself questions without even realizing it?”
The diagram below explains how questions can have a great effect on your life. I like to call this diagram “The Spiral Effect”.
Think of a situation where you tried to get something done, but it just didn’t seem to work no matter what. For demonstration purposes, let’s use an example where a man is having a hard time losing weight.
Since everything starts with a question, some of the first things that he’s likely to say are something like, “What is wrong with me? Why am I always fat? Why can’t I lose weight?” As soon as he would ask one of those questions his brain would instantly come up with one of the following responses: “because you are a pig” or “because you are destined to be fat.” In other words, the quality of questions that you ask will directly reflect on the kind of response you will get. But it doesn’t stop there because it perpetuates further. As soon as he gets a negative response like that, his state or mood will drop. As a result, it will lead him to ask another negative question. The new negative question inevitably leads to another negative response, which is followed by an even lower state. This crazy downward spiral will keep going. Oftentimes, it leads people to fall into depression.
On the other hand, the same process applies to people who state their questions in a positive way. The only difference is that positively stated questions create an upward spiral effect and lead to much better quality of life. The best thing about this is that we are able to consciously decide on the kind of questions that we ask. If you will commit to asking a better question every time you face a challenging situation your life will improve dramatically.
I hope you can see how asking a better question will help you change your focus instantly. Just think about how you would feel if next time when you are facing a difficult situation you would just ask yourself, “what’s good about this situation?” Or “what can I learn from this?” Or maybe even “how can I fix this?” There is almost unlimited number of ways you can use this to your advantage every single day of your life.
The Power Of Meaning:
This is another great way to shift what you focus on very quickly. If you combine the power of meaning with the power of questions and keep using this every single day for approximately thirty days, you will see your self-confidence shoot through the roof.
The reason you are always in control of your life is because you can consciously choose the meaning of everything that happens to you in your daily life.
There is always anther way to look at every situation. You should always strive to turn every situation that look disempowering at first glance into an empowering one. The more you will use this technique, the more proficient you will become at it. There is no way you can be rejected if you are the one who determines what things mean. This gives you total control of your life. Therefore, it will also increase your self-confidence greatly. But remember, the key is to condition yourself to use this technique subconsciously.
The Power Of Making A Decision:
If you want to reduce stress you must learn to use the power of making decisions. All the greatest leaders are able to make quick, calculated decisions in tough situations. No paralysis or procrastination.
There are only two kinds of fear; the fear of unknown, and anticipation anxiety/fear. You can fix both by either making a decision and/or changing the meaning of whatever it is that you are anticipating.
Things will always be a lot more stressful if you have multiple good or bad choices on the table. Sometimes it’s much better if you can just take a chance and commit to one thing instead of procrastinating. As soon as you make a firm decision and forget about the other choice your stress and anxiety will begin to dissipate almost instantly.
The Power Of Physiology:
Your physiology plays a major role in the way that you feel. Most people believe that your feelings shape your physiology. While that is true, studies also prove that your physiology plays a huge part in shaping your feelings.
Physiology consists of your posture, breathing, facial expression, voice tone and strength, and your movements.
Years ago, there was an experiment conducted with depressed people. It proved physiology to be more effective than anyone every anticipated. In order to get all the depressed individuals to snap out of their depressed state all they had to do was make them stand up straight and put a big silly grin on their faces. All they did was change their physiology and the subjects could no longer stay in a state of depression. You can try this yourself right now. Stand up straight, breath deeply, and put a huge silly grin on your face. Give it a shot. See if you can feel sad while doing this at the same time.
Turning Fear Into Power:
No matter how self-confident you become, there isn’t a single person in the world that doesn’t experiences a certain level of fear or anxiety from time to time. But what is the difference between people who can look fear in the eye and take massive action, versus those who will always retreat at the first sign of fear?
The answer is very simple. Some people are able to turn fear into power in split seconds. Are these people freaks of nature, or is this something that can be learned? The good news is that it’s not something you are born with, but rather something that can be learned.
Depending on the individual and the situation, everyone experiences fear and anxiety a bit differently. To get a better perspective on this, I want you to do the following exercise:
1. Using your five senses, try to recall a specific situation in which you would normally feel anxious. When you begin to feel a bit anxious, try to notice where in your body do you feel anxiety or tension. Is it in the pit of your stomach? Is it in your chest? Do you feel it in your legs? Try to pinpoint a place in your body where you feel the most tension. Also, be sure to pay close attention to that feeling in terms of what it feels like. You might even want to describe this sensation on paper.
2. This time, I want you to recall a situation where you felt really excited about something. Use all your senses to recall that feeling when you know something totally awesome is about to happen. Pay close attention to what these sensations feel like, and where in your body do you feel them. Write this down as well.
3. Now, compare these two sensations to each other. You will most likely notice that in both cases the sensations were very similar to each other. The only real difference in each situation is the meaning that you attached to these sensations.
The only reason anxiety stops you from taking action is because you have conditioned yourself to respond that way to the sensations you feel in your body in the presence of anxiety. It’s a reflex that was developed over many years, like pinch and ouch.
The same thing applies to situations where you know that something awesome is coming. You have conditioned yourself to respond with excitement when certain things happen that cause you to feel sensations of excitement in your body.
But getting back to fear and anxiety. You allow it to stop you from taking action, not because you can’t physically do it, but because it’s a conditioned response in your body. You are used to giving yourself a command in terms of what you can and cannot do based on the following three criteria:
1. Situation.
2. Sensation
3. Meaning
Subconsciously, you have associated a meaning to a sensation in your body that you feel in certain situations.
If you want to turn fear into power on autopilot, you must learn to consciously attach a meaning of excitement onto the sensations that would normally make you feel anxious. If you do this consciously for approximately thirty days it will become automatic for you.
The sensations you are feeling are nothing but energy flowing through your nervous system from your brain to wherever you normally feel “anxiety” in your body. But the meaning you attach to those sensations are completely up to you.
Next time, when you feel a sensation of “anxiety” building up in your body, just change its meaning. Instead of getting worried about the consequences that may follow, just begin to expect that something awesome is about to happen. Remember, the sensations are almost identical, but how you respond to these sensations is what will really make a difference in your life. Why live in fear if you can choose to be excited instead?
The combination of all these tools or techniques that we just covered will put you in full control of your life. The problem is that most people don’t use these tools to their advantage. Also, remember that you can use these tools as initial pieces of your evidence stacking routine if you like.
Don’t forget to check out some of my other titles:
If you find it difficult to meet new people, then this book will help you become a master at confidently striking up conversations with anyone you’d like to meet.
In this book you will learn how to enjoy life as if it were the most wonderful gift every day.
Thanks for picking up a copy of this book. I truly hope that you found it helpful. If you are interested in receiving a free copy of my next book, then simply get on the list. It’s free and totally safe. I will not send you spam.
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