Focus on Your Fears: A Strategy for Action

Once upon a time – OK, fine. All the time, I’m faced with fears, and risk being a coward. I’m afraid I can’t cover the bills, I’m afraid my wife will think my latest get-rich-scheme will be nuts, I’m afraid the shoes I want will look stupid on my feet. When there is something I need to do, the biggest impediment to taking action is ALWAYS my fear.

All men have fears, but real men are not governed by them.

Recently, I stumbled on a way to make my fears an advantage, both at work and in my personal life. If you follow the advice below, you too can make your fears a source of power, and start crushing life.

The Problem

Here’s the pattern; see if any of this pertains to you.

Let’s say I’m facing a problem I don’t know how to solve, like a big bill I can’t afford to pay by the deadline. A great plan here would be to call the biller and work out a payment program, or defer the bill to a later date, or take some money earmarked for another more lenient bill. Maybe none of these are the right strategy, but they’re at least trying to solve the problem.

Instead of taking action, I tend to think to myself, “I’ll just deal with this later today.” Later today turns into tomorrow. Tomorrow turns into the next day. Before you know it, the deadline’s here and I need to panic and do something now! It doesn’t help things that I also need to tell my wife what’s wrong, and pretty much force her to go along with my panic plan.

It’s usually some variation of this.

1. Get confronted with a situation that inspires fear
2. Plan to come up with a plan to deal with it at a later time
3. Keep planning to think about it
4. Slam into the situation with no plan or preparation, and cause a cascade of other problems.

Sometimes, I’ll even forget about the problem I fear, until it’s too late.

The deep issue here is clear – I’m trying to protect myself from getting hurt in the near term, by putting that hurt into the future and trying to wish it away.

Imagine if this was how the US Congress worked when considering the national deficit! Oh, wait, that is how the Congress deals with things like this.

There must be a better way.

If you watch Instagram, you’ll know that the only way to deal with fears like this is to feel your feelings and stare your fears down and come into yourself and not be a victim of trauma and whatever.

Instead of that, I’ll present here a realistic, concrete way to deal with fears, by hunting for them and making them work for you instead of against you.

The Clue, from Work

I stumbled on this technique while worrying about something at work.

I’m a data engineer for a pretty successful hedge fund. One of the situations I get faced with often is data quality. In other words, for a given data set, do we have all the data? Are we missing any data? Is there any overlap or double counting? What should I even expect to see?

One day, I was given a data set that had been manually loaded by someone else months ago. My job was to automate the loading, but make sure everything got loaded properly.

A gnawing fear started to grow in the pit of my stomach. How do I determine what “properly loaded” even means in this case? I don’t even know what the data is supposed to represent! Maybe the existing data set isn’t even loaded properly!

While dealing with this mounting pile of fears for a specific project, it struck me: a document that laid out how to know if the data was right, complete, and nothing more, would quickly help me get peace of mind. Well, why shouldn’t I be the one to write the document? It could help someone else who was faced with a similar problem down the line; it could even help future me.

The problem here was not that I didn’t know how to validate data. The problem was that the fear was causing paralysis.

The solution, therefore, wasn’t a series of steps to ensure data quality in a messy data set. The solution was rather a strategy to face down a specific fear that stops me from acting.

For this specific case, I’ve adopted a habit now of starting every project – whether new or hand-me-down – with the documentation. If there is no existing document, I’ll create one; if there is documentation, I’ll add to it. Besides standard boilerplate information (owner’s email, source and target locations, etc.), I’ll address any question about the project that give me the least bit of worry or uncertainty.

Three steps to courage and universal acclaim

I’m still in the process of distilling the strategy; here is the current working version.

1. Identify your fears

Right after lunch each day (or at 1:00 pm if I miss lunch), I spend about 2 minutes brainstorming about things that are giving me the willies. These get scrawled out on whatever scrap of paper is near me – usually a catchall notepad on my work desk. After doing this, I’ll eat a small, tasty dessert to reinforce the habit.

Sometimes I have a hard time getting started, even though I know those fucking fears are in there. In this case, it helps to have a few categories to interrogate. Maybe you will have a different list, but here’s mine:

• Relationship with Wife
• Kids and school
• Upcoming social events
• Bills
• Upcoming trips
• Work
• Communications (emails, texts, phone calls that need to happen)

2. Pick one and dress it down

Trying to take on all the fears will just overwhelm you, so for now just pick one. Schedule fifteen minutes later that day to interrogate this fear. Right now, open your calendar app (get one if you don’t have one – Google, Microsoft, Apple, whatever), and block out fifteen minutes.

Now, when that time comes, dig into that fear and figure out why it gives you the heebie-jeebies, or at least why you’re avoiding action.

For example, say your utility bill is way over budget – isn’t it always? Maybe the gateway fear is, “I don’t know where I’m going to get the money for this.” What happens if you don’t pay the bill? More fears – “what if they shut off the electricity?”, “What if they charge a late fee?”, “What if Wife finds out?” Tear the fear into pieces so you know exactly what you’re dealing with.

3. Identify a core fear that prevents action

Your core fear identifies one uncertainty that prevents you from taking action. That uncertainty then points to a new habit you can build, so the fear can get effectively neutralized.

Take our bill example from above. The core fear is “I don’t know if I’ll screw myself later by paying for this bill now.” In other words, it’s fear of an unknown money situation.

4. Create a habit to address the fear

Now that you have shined a light on a specific fear, build one habit to start handling the cause of the fear.

The habit to build in in our bills example is, start tracking your money. Granted, easier said than done. But, a relatively quick first solution here is to start using some kind of budgeting software to track your income and expenses. These programs usually do a mildly good job of forecasting where you will be a short time in the future, like a few months. Some good apps are Simplifi, You Need A Budget, or EveryDollar.

Your habit can be to open that app every day during your first coffee break. Spend 5 minutes to look at your current balance and review bills coming down the line.

The path to integrity

Notice, this is NOT a strategy to help deal with that one particular problem. It’s a strategy for hunting down weak spots in your life, so these areas can be strengthened. It’s a strategy for becoming a more powerful person overall, which will in turn make these small problems far easier to handle in the future.

Right now, grab the nearest piece of paper and a writing instrument, and take two minutes to write down the tasks that worry you. Afterwards, pick one and use its underlying fears to guide you towards stronger behaviors.

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