1: Author Steven Kotler thought bravery meant not being afraid.
“I thought that was how ‘men’ were supposed to feel, or, more specifically, not to feel,” he writes in The Art of the Impossible.
The two words that changed his entire relationship with fear?
“You, too,” spoken by big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton.
Laird was showing Steven how to jump a jet ski off big waves. He promised Steven that if he got bounced from his jet ski, the worst thing that would happen was he would get the wind knocked out of him.
Steven decided to test this theory. He revved up the engine to fifty miles per hour to jump off the wave.
Sure enough, he crashed. Sure enough, he got the wind knocked out of him, amongst other things.
2: Laird swung around on his jet ski to pick Steven up and uttered the two words above.
“What he meant was that, just like me, he, the widely acknowledged king of action sports, toughest of the tough, also felt fear,” Steven writes. “And he also hated himself for feeling that fear. And just like me, he had also learned to go right at his fear as a way of relieving his fear.”
Not feeling the fear is not what it means to be brave. No. Bravery is feeling the fear and choosing to move forward anyway.
The only way out is through.
When the two men were back on the beach, Laird explained further: “Fear is the most common emotion in my life. I’ve been afraid for so long—well, honestly, I can’t ever remember not being afraid. It’s what you do with that fear that makes all the difference.”
Laird’s message? Fear is not something to avoid. Fear drives focus. And focus drives flow, or being “in the zone.”
“We naturally pay attention to the stuff that scares us,” Steven notes. “Hell, when something really scares us, the hard part is not paying attention to it. Fear drives attention. This is huge. Something that normally requires a ton of energy now happens automatically.”
3: Fear is also a big-time motivator.
“Which is why learning to treat fear as a challenge to rise toward rather than a threat to be avoided can make such a profound difference in our lives,” he writes.
When we embrace fear rather than run from it, we unleash tremendous capability inside ourselves. We learn to work with and capitalize on this emotion.
If we “can take all of that energy and use it to drive focus and concentration in the short term, and as a directional arrow in the long term, then we’ve added an extremely potent force to our stack of grit skills.”
More tomorrow!
______________________
Action: Do something today that scares me.
Reflection: Afterwards, reflect on the experience. Did my fear drive focus and attention?
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