Fear is a Precursor to Courage

Fear always pulls the gun into the picture. Fear always puts the gun between the eyes and the bird.

“I have a hard time admitting that I was afraid,” a student once told us. “But the more I thought about it, it is fear. I’d never really thought about it as fear. I always call it being careful or making sure.”

The root cause is fear, and fear pulls your ability to anticipate from out in the future to right back where you are.

Everything we do in life involves an anticipation circuit. A singer anticipates. A quarterback anticipates. An airplane pilot better be anticipating if I’m on board. The chef anticipates. The contractor anticipates. The athlete, regardless of arena, anticipates. The artist, the surgeon, the fisherman, the hunter, target setters, and everyone who drives a car. When you go to the bathroom, guess what? You’re anticipating.

The more you do something, the more it becomes subconscious. The more you do it subconsciously, the more it begins to be an anticipation circuit. Because the more you do it, the less fear you have about your ability to do it.

Everything you do in your everyday life is a result of your own anticipation circuit.

It happens without thought. The more you do something, the better you become at it, and the further out into the future your subconscious brain can anticipate. And the more the subconscious via anticipation, the further out it can anticipate, the more the subconscious can at the beginning correct things when they’re beginning to go wrong. This would be long before you would even become aware of the problem. It can actually begin to correct things that you’re doing before you become aware that there’s a correction that’s needed.

That would be the zone. You’ve all been in the zone, and everybody describes the zone experiences as effortless. It’s easy.

 

This is an excerpt from the October 2012 Coaching Hour podcast. You can listen to it and read a written transcript, along with more than 20 years of archived episodes with your Knowledge Vault membership.