Define your fears to achieve the objectives

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This is the method I want to talk to you about now: defining your fears so that you can achieve your goals.

Step 1: Identifying your fears
The first step is to identify your fears. He advises to list ten, but I’m only going to use one example here: breaking, losing or having my laptop stolen during my road trip.

Once you have your fears identified, you will look for a strategy to prevent them from happening (while achieving your goal of course). In my case, my avoidance strategy could be to use my smartphone rather than the computer. It is indeed more easily transportable, and cheaper to replace in the event of loss / theft / breakage. And since it is connected with my computer, I have access to all of my files, I can process my emails, etc. In short, I can do most of my work from my phone.

Finally, let’s think about what to do if our avoidance solution ever fails, and we need to fix it. So I realized that if I ever broke my smartphone, I could always go to an internet cafe to check my emails regularly. It is true that it is less easy, but it is doable. I also planned another solution: my roommate at the time had all my computer access codes. So that if necessary, she could remotely do small missions for me.

And lo and behold, as simple as that, I practically defused my fear just by calmly thinking of solutions. I summarize the strategy for you in the table below.

Step 2: the benefits of success
Next, let’s think about what would happen if we achieved our goal (without our fear realizing). How would you feel if you got there? How would you benefit? The idea is to motivate yourself through the visualization method (strategy 4 of the article).

In my case, the main benefits are:

Have a great vacation with my brothers;
Realize that it is possible for me to leave like this, remotely, and for a while.

Step 3: what happens if we do nothing?
Finally, the third and last step of the method is to think about the cost of inaction. What happens if, out of fear, I don’t try to achieve my goals? What do I stand to lose?

I think it was the trigger in my case. Indeed, I always imagined different scenarios in which my holidays went well, or in which they went bad. But in all of these scenarios, I imagined going on vacation. At no time had I considered not leaving because of my fears. In the worst case, I would come back sad and without a computer, but I would come back from vacation anyway. It’s funny is not it ? So I took 5 minutes to imagine not leaving. And I think the idea of missing this opportunity was actually worse than losing my computer. So I decided to go, whatever the cost.

Conclusion
To conclude, I think I’m not the only one who often gets stuck in achieving my goals because I’m scared. It can be the fear of ridicule, the fear that something will go wrong, that I will break something, or anything, but the fear is very often there. However, it seems that defining fears and thinking about the situation from all angles can still achieve your goals.