I hope you don’t grow weary of me talking about Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here, but it has so much great practical advice that I feel compelled to share bits of it with you. (I’m trying to be careful to not share so much that I infringe on his copyright … I feel safe by qualifying that there is no way I could give away all of the details of this great book: there is so much great info in that I couldn’t duplicate if I tried.)
Anyway, now that I am on my second reading of it, working my way through it slowly and taking notes and answering the questions he poses, I have come to his section on addressing one’s fears. His thesis is that facing our fears reduces them in size immensely.
For me, his thesis turned out be absolutely correct. I wrote down about nine fears (some of which had been somewhat buried in my subconscious) and looked them over, and every one was much smaller than I had been thinking it was.
What’s the value/importance of this? The importance is that our fears, which we sometimes don’t even realize we have, can keep us from taking actions that are best for us and those we love. An obvious example is when you have a desire to start a business (about something you are really interested in) but you put it off forever because of a fear of failure.
And, the value is, that writing your fears down is a first step to developing action plans for facing them square on. That’s the thing that never gets done as long as your fears are just floating around in your mind.
Of course you may decide that you don’t want to fight some fears. Perhaps you decide that, even though you think the fear of failure is less than you initially thought it would be, you still don’t want to start a business because you are not ready to face the fear of failure. But, writing your fears down will (1) probably reduce their size from you thought they were and (2) give you a start on developing action plans to deal with the ones you decide to deal with.