Stuck on Fear

On a recent episode of The Tim Ferriss Show with Steven Pressfield, Tim mentioned an exercise he does, called Fear Setting. 

He talks about it at length in this TED talk:

In short, fear setting is the opposite of goal setting. Rather than articulating what you want to happen, you list everything you think could go wrong. Then, for each item on the list, you write a) what you might do to prevent the risk, and then, b) if the risk came true, what you would do to repair it. 

In one sense, this is a standard strategic planning exercise that I’m sure many of us would use at work to get a handle on the risks of a potential initiative. 

Yet, in my coaching practice, I’ve seen several people struggle to assess the potential risks when considering a big change in their lives—e.g., starting a new profession, or starting their own business. Rather than an “objective” and multi-dimensional assessment of the potential benefits and downsides of a decision, their assessment is more emotional and one-dimensional. 

Rather than, “On balance, this could be a good next step,” the assessment sounds like, “This will be wildly successful, or my life will be completely ruined.”

“There’s some uncertainty about how it will turn out” becomes simply, “It’s risky.” 

Either way, those thoughts arrest forward motion.

So what helps “unstick” one’s thoughts?

For starters, something like the Fear Setting exercise is useful. I’ve also seen these questions be helpful to people: 

“If things go bad, would it be a pebble hitting you or a meteor?”

In other words, are you about to do something where the negative outcome is catastrophic, or just not ideal? 

Being able to discriminate between those two types of outcomes is important for scaling the riskiness of a decision. More importantly, it often helps us realize that we’ve got options and control, even if things don’t work out. It can take the imagined risk from something that’s scary to something that we can wrap our arms around.

“What would happen right before [the catastrophic outcome]? What would happen before that?...”

I’m reminded of this quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’”

The “good” part about many of the catastrophic outcomes we might face is that they have bright warning signs. 

That is, if we care to look. In many of these cases, the risk isn’t that we’ll go bankrupt or lose our homes or have our reputations ruined. The real risk is that we’ll fail to heed to warnings that we’re entering dangerous territory. 

Hence, by proactively identifying the markers of danger, we can avoid getting stuck by the potential risk and focus more on how we might manage them. 

(Of course, activities with no-advanced-warning catastrophic outcomes aren’t ideal. That’s why I’m a believer in Sebastian Maniscalco’s line on scuba diving: “I don’t do anything where there’s like a safety briefing prior to the activity. I don’t want to do anything out of my wheelhouse.”) 

“Is this a worry or a concern?”

A “concern” is a clear-eyed, technical assessment of the potential negative outcomes of a decision. But “worry” is an emotion—it exists in a different dimension. 

For example, I’m concerned about walking across a busy street, in that I understand the possibility of being hit by a car. That causes me to look both ways before trying to do so. But having completed that step, I’m not worried about the risk. It does not cause anxiety.  

Importantly, the solution set for the concerns are different from the solution set for the worries. The former calls for prevention or mitigation—strategies that are “out there” in the world. The latter calls for reframing, adopting a new approach, or just taking a deep breath to be more comfortable with the risk—all strategies that are “in here” in our minds.

“How likely is it that more analysis reduces the risk?”

One way we often deal with fear—and especially fear of the unknown—is to do more planning. And sure, at the start of a decision-making process, some planning and analysis is helpful to get our minds around potential risks. 

But you can’t analyze away the uncertainty of the future. The additional planning doesn’t help with that. And that’s especially true if the planning isn’t about getting real information about the world. 

Helpfully, the only real information about the world comes from doing stuff—like actually creating a prototype of the product to see if it works, or actually offering the service and seeing if people will pay for it. 

Luckily, that doing is the very opposite of being stuck. It’s action.