Turning Fear Into Fuel by Jonathan Fields at TEDxCMU 2010 (Transcript)

I signed a lease on a six-year lease on the floor in a building in the city that lived and with the goal of opening what I hoped to be the premier Yoga Center. Which if I was a guy who came into the yoga world, maybe I wouldn’t be so odd. But I was a guy who not too long before was a venture capital lawyer in a large firm.

So according to pretty much everybody around me, I had no experience, no reputation, no investors, no clients and no damn business doing this, with a three-month-old baby and a family and a home in town, do you think that may be a little bit fearful? Just slightest bit of anxious.

The city by the way — and this is the support that I got — by those closest to me. And by the way the night that I signed that lease, I have to tell you for some odd reason, I slept like a baby that night. It was really great.

So I go to bed that night, a little bit freaked out about what I was doing, was it the right call? This is my dream. This is the thing that I think is going to make me come alive. Nervous, anxious; can I handle this?

The city was New York. The date that I signed the lease – September 10, 2001.

When I woke the next morning, my city was literally in flame. And I was a longtime New Yorker.

And what you hear my voice now talking about this isn’t well – yeah, it’s nervous about talking here but that’s not what really you’re hearing. What you’re hearing is for those of us that were in the city that day, as far from that date as we remove ourselves, it’s still right there. It’s still right there.

And the first thing that happens that morning is my thoughts started fleeting between two worrying things. One was – who did I know? Because everybody knew somebody if we were in the city.

Who did I know? Did I know somebody that was in the towers that day?

And then the other thing I was bouncing between was – what am I doing? Am I seriously going to launch a business into this – into this a bed of pain and morning in sadness. And remind yourselves also that at that moment we didn’t know if this was the first of many. Or if this was it?

And as the day progressed and I was talking to my wife. We started to realize we did, in fact, know somebody who was working in 108^th floor in one of the towers. A father, a friend of ours is a married father, the two-and-a-half year old and a nine month old son. And then they actually just finished with their dream home a few months earlier at the suburb. So we put my daughter into the car, drove up  there to the house where there was a vigil going on hoping for some word that sadly would never come.

And as the day progressed and as people made their way home, that ended up being just our friend, the wife, and my wife and me and my daughter who was sleeping with two kids and the two moms went up and put the nine-month-old to sleep. And they asked me if I would go and read the two-and-a-half year old the story.

And I remember it’s like I’m there today. I remember walking up the steps, not knowing what to expect. And opening his door and seeing him just sitting there.

[Well Flannel PJ’s Half-Cocked], his favorite book in his lap. And wondering who you are you – you know, what are you doing here? Knowing that I was a guy who had to now try and just in some way make him feel okay. And I sat down and read the story to him.

Slowly he laid back and he fell asleep. And in that moment as I was sitting there something in me change. Something in me changed. There was a realization that this is it. My friend did not go to work that morning expecting everybody to come home but it happened. This is our bite at the apple.

And as I look back on that moment, there’s something that Steve Jobs said a number of years later in actually his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, where he said remembering that you’re going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

So driving home that evening, in my mind as I am thinking okay, going back to the yoga studio and the lease that I just signed, and the huge amount of money I am about to spend to make this business a reality; am I really going to do this? Am I really going to do this? It’s something that I have to do now because I feel this is our bite at the apple. This is my shot.

Am I filled with fear and anxiety? Yeah, big time. But this is my one chance. I don’t get [do lovers].

So as we went home and I made the decision to actually go forward with it. I was asking these questions. I was saying to myself: Do I launch my company or walk away and do arise both fear and anxiety? And based on large part of that moment on what had just happened, in that room with this two-and-a-half year-old boy, the answer was yes.

And I went ahead and launched it and that studio, [then repaired] seven years grew into one of the largest most successful studios in New York City, and potentially in the country where more importantly than that I had an opportunity over that period time to touch the lives of tens of thousands of people, to impact people’s lives in a deeper way from around the world. We trained hundreds and hundreds of yoga teachers at the same time.

And it became this magical experience for me and actually in December 2009, I sold that company. But this whole experience stirred in me something that led me to want to explore deeper, to try and figure out what is it – what is it that makes people – some people able to just move past fear, to move past anxiety, and actually do these things which terrify them. And what is it that makes people just stop cold? And we’re going to go into that. There are three big questions that we’re going to explore.

But first, I want to ask you a question. I am going to show you a picture in a second. And I am going to ask you a question about it before you see it, so you can really focus in on the answer.

And the question is very simply – what color are the laces? What color are the laces?

Okay. Can anybody tell me what color laces were? White. Does everyone agree the laces were white?

Okay. So pretty much 400-something people in the room said, okay, one second, white laces.

But a second question, what about the girl? What color of dress she was wearing? White girl. Take a look at in sunglasses. Is the girl lying down on the dock reflected wearing a white dress? And the question is: why did nobody notice her, and I’ve done this – and I’ve actually kept the slide up for a minute and nobody sees the girl. Why doesn’t anyone see her? It’s because nobody told you to look for her. Nobody told you to look for her.

What started to realize in my exploration about fear is that very often it starts with the questions that we ask and the things that we observe but also beyond that, the really big thing is it’s about the things that we don’t notice. The questions we don’t ask and the things that we don’t see that really take that fear and just let it blossom.

So I’m asked a lot, and I’ve written about – how do you handle fear? You seem to be somebody who has moved through it, who has launched a number of businesses, who has changed careers, made huge change in life, how do you handle it? And my answer is always a question that – which is fear of what?

And the three big fears that alwaya come up are fear of failure, fear of judgment and I’ll be enough, the fear of success. There’s a real fear of success freaks people out and whenever that happen – like think of a business for a second and say, but if this scales too quickly, I’ll never be able to handle the demand and it will shut me down and will destroy my life. That’s a real concern but the real thing, the big thing when you go back to the top 10 phobia list, of these three, the thing that’s always on there is fear of failure.

And fear of failure can be this devastating thing because we just ask this question, we ask what if I failed. And then instead of just creating a realistic scenario, say, okay this is what happens and I’ll get through it. What we do is we create a doomsday scenario and I know nobody in this room has done this but you probably know some people that may have done this. You’re spinning your head, oh, my god, if this thing collapses, I am going to lose everything: my home, my relationships, and I am probably going to get thrown out of the country – I am going to have to live in the order, they can take away my shoes, I have to eat raw fish for the rest of my life. It’d be the biggest disaster on the planet.

And then that creates this thing where it shuts us down. It just takes the fear and anxiety and it ramps it up big time and we do something even more powerful. We take a doomsday scenario and we hit spin. Nobody’s done that either, right?

Repetition breeds belief

So what happens when you hit spin, is sadly even though we’re sitting in this beautiful University hall, some of the brightest people in the world I’m sure in here, we’re so much closer to Pavlov’s dogs than we’d ever like thing because the way our brains work is repetition breeds belief. We can start with a thought, a fact of scenario or vision and in our mind regardless of whether it starts in truth, the more we repeat it, the more we believe that to be the absolute truth, the only possible outcome, not A mental model but a B model of the world. There is no other option. And the more we buy into that, the more we buy into the fact that this is the only possible outcome for this thing, the more we’re absolutely engulfed with fear and anxiety and the more it becomes paralysis. We can’t move. We can’t move.

But there’s one thing which is even more insidious than that. It stops us or focus on this stops us from asking two other questions which are mission critical to our ability to reframe fear and move through it. And those two questions are: What if I do nothing? What if I succeed?

So let’s go back. We’re going to cycle back and we’re going to go through these 3 questions.

What if I fail?

Now it’s important to ask this question. You don’t blow it off but in asking it, what I want you to do next time is take that question and instead of creating a doomsday scenario, what I want you to do is create a very realistic. Now what if I failed? Write it out. Paint a picture. Make it a movie. Make it as vivid as you can. But that’s only half of the what if I fail question.

The other half is how will I recover? And give equal attention to that picture. Plot out exactly what you will do to get yourself back. What most people find is doing that alone goes a long way towards disempowering the fear of failure because they realize almost everything is recoverable. It may suck up a little bit. It may be hard but it’s recoverable. Take that scenario now – the realistic scenario, set it aside.

And then we move on to the second question – which is what if I do nothing? And for a lot of people what if I do nothing seems like a no brainer question but the reality is for most people, the what if I do nothing is the most horrible scenario out there. Because if there’s an opportunity, there’s something you’re not doing now that would make you come alive because you’re being paralyzed by fear and anxiety. If those opportunities present themselves over and over and over during the course of your life, 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now and you keep backing away and doing nothing, do you think that you’d just keep going sideways in life and you’d kind of hum along? If you’re a little bit unhappy now, do you think 10, 20, 30, years of doing nothing will keep you a little bit unhappy now? If you’re little bit overweight now, do you think 10, 20 or 30 years of sitting behind a desk and eating cheesecake for breakfast will keep you the same weight?

If your relationships are a little bit tense now, do you think if you do nothing, they’ll still be a little bit tense 10, 20, 30 years from now? Now there is no sideways in life. Simple fact is life applies friction. There is no sideways. There’s up or down and life conspires organically to slowly grind us to a halt. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing; it’s just a thing. Part of our job is to apply lubrication and energy. To change the trajectory and go up.

There is no sideways. And so when you answer the do nothing scenario, you create a very realistic picture of what will my life look like if I do nothing. And what most people find is when you track that out 5, 10, 15, 20 years, that is the far more terrifying scenario than failure and recovery. Create that scenario in your head, set it next to the failure and recovery.

And now we get to move to the third one. The third one – and this is where we have fun because so far we’ve been talking about reframing and disempowering fear and anxiety. But now we talk about hope.

Now we move to the other side of the equation: where am I going?

And we ask the final question: What if I succeed?

What if I succeed right now? I have another question for you: Who in this room is sitting here – who in this room is sitting here, not doing something that they believe in their heart has the opportunity to make them come alive? Maybe it’s introducing yourself to somebody you would like to connect with. Maybe it’s starting a company. Maybe it’s starting a project, whatever it is – who is not doing that thing? Who would do it if you were a 100% certain you would not fail?

A couple of hands. So we’ve got like 50% hands out and 50% who are in denial – which is okay. So the fact is what I want you to do now is if you have that thing in your mind, what is that thing with the opportunity to make you come alive, that you’re not doing because you don’t have that certainty quite now. You freak out about failure.

Close your eyes and I want you to place yourself five years out in the future now, and want you to paint the picture as if you’ve already done it, you are there. That fantasy scenario is done. The thing that you thought you couldn’t do and you freak about trying, it’s done. You are there. You’ve achieved it beyond your wildest imagination. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it taste like? And – feel against your face in that place.

And then I want you to do one more thing with that vision. Now I want you to hit spin.

Helen Keller once said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing”. I’m inclined to agree. I cannot resign myself to the notion of living the rest of my life in a vacuum of regret. I cannot resign myself to the notion that I will have spent time on this earth with never having done anything to actually come alive out of fear. And I cannot – cannot fathom the notion that in some way through my action or inaction, I may have taught my daughter – the little girl – to do the same.

So as you move forward from this morning, the challenge I issue to you is take that thing that we just put into your mind, that you’ve been putting off because you’re afraid of failing. Take it, bring it present again and ask the three questions:

What if I fail and recover? What if I do nothing? By God, what if I succeed?

Thank you.

 

 

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