Stop magnifying your fears in your mind

Day 30 / 365

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality”

This is a quote by Seneca, an ancient Greek philosopher from the school of stoicism. Although developed over 2300 years ago, Stoicism is still quite popular. You can think of it as the philosophy for pragmatic people. Instead of words and theories, Stoicism puts more focus on action.

I can’t possibly summarize much of Stoicism in one blog post. But the good thing about Stoicism is that it provides us with practical methods you can apply in your day to day life. Fear-Setting is one such method, and I’ll discuss that in this blog post.

How to get over your fears

Fear-Setting is a technique of analyzing your fears with the aim of overcoming them. It’s easy to do all you need is three sheets of paper and a pen.

What could go wrong?

Consider something that you are afraid of doing. It might be a career change, or asking a girl out, or moving to a different city. Now take the first peach of paper and divide it into 3 columns

• On the first column write all the things that you think can go wrong. This could be something like — “I’ll hate my new job more than my current one.”
• On the second write ways, you can prevent or at least decrease the possibility of those thing going wrong. So this would be something like — “I can talk to more people working in similar jobs to know more about it”
• On the third column write a strategy to recover if things do go wrong. For the case of you hating your new job, you could write — “ I can try to switch to a different role or project within the new company”

You should spend about 10–15 minutes on this page.

What could go right?

Now move on to the second page. Think about the best case scenario now, what could you achieve if your risk actually paid off? Spend 10–15 minutes on this as well and try to write as many points as you can.

The cost of inaction

This is probably the most important step. When thinking about taking a risk we often only consider what could go wrong if we do it. We ignore the cost of inaction — what are we losing by not taking that risk. So on the third page write down what negative effects such inaction would have, over the next year, 2 years and 5 years.

We often overthink the consequences of taking a risk, which is why our fears overpower us. This exercise helps us to avoid that and I would recommend giving this a try.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog —What makes a good life