I don’t want to spend every single blog post lauding contributor after contributor, or there wouldn’t be any surprises left by the time the book came out. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t absolutely love to discuss fear and tools for dealing with it with you, though. In the future, watch this space because the Fear.less team is on the hunt for resources, articles, or anything at all that involves overcoming fear. If you can help us along, that would be awesome. Our contact information is up top.
Years ago a friend who was much older than me gave me the following advice:
Always cut the deck if it ups your odds.
Not much of a card player, I was confused. Basically it means if you are struggling with adversity, introduce a random element and see what happens because you have nothing to lose. Many times, a sudden and unexpected action or development can work wonders against your fear. I’ll give you a humble example.
A few months ago my roommates were sprawled on their couches, wallowing in misery and dread over upcoming final exams. It was an almost constant torrent of basketcased dismay – about illogical grading practices, the impossibility of the material, everything. It was as if a C in aeronautics translated to an F in life.
I wasn’t immune to the malaise, but I was getting tired of it. I unplugged my headphones and turned up my volume, and after one roommate’s particularly incensed mini-rant, I fired off a clearly misapplied Instant Rimshot.
The positive effect was immediate and stunning. After we stopped giggling like hyenas, we realized what we had learned – that just because circumstances are outside your control, the forces that do have control are not necessarily malevolent. The Instant Rimshot represents a theme that is brought up over and over again in Fear.less – looking at your situation from a different perspective (in this case humorous).
Fear.less contributor Danielle LaPorte wrote an amazing blog post on how to be depressed (certainly a common partner of fear), and one of the tips involves casting your feelings in an absurd light by playing dramatic music, flailing your arms and declaring your plight. I’ve confirmed that moaning “I’m so depressed!” and then playing the sad trombone works equally well.
Sometimes all you need to reframe your perspective is to shake things up a little, and sometimes all you need to shake things up a little is a goofy sound clip. I stated above that we at Fear.less are being vigilant for useful fear-related material, but vigilance can also help you catch something that can turn everything around, if nowhere else, at least in your mind and heart.
Today’s fear-related song of the day is Morcheeba – Fear and Love. Love – now there’s something that comes up a few times in Fear.less.
As a fledgling graphic designer I see a lot of colleagues bitch and moan about the unnecessary constraints in design projects, from existing corporate identities to technological limitations. Many don’t realise that it’s these anchors that keep us weighed down in a place where we can work from instead of drifting aimlessly across the seas, never knowing where we want to go. I find myself artificially creating constraints in my work (only use a single color, create it as a collage, pretend it has to fit on a postage stamp) just to have that safe feeling of an anchor from which to epxlore my possibilities.
Another great example of this is Leah Buley’s superhero of market research idea, which she published on the adaptive path blog. There, she talks about how in order to distort the focus, she invented imaginary superheroes to whom any power could be attributed. Silly concepts such as the superhero of travel (complete with shapeshifting shoes and invisible suitcases) really help people to throw needless worrying out of the window and just concentrate on what might work.
All in all, shifting gears mentally is an important skill if you’re stuck, and now we only need a place that provides an instant shifting gear sound
man, thanks for this post. i had never heard of the superhero thing. what a great framework for brainstorming.
one would have a lot of swag if one went into a meeting and began by blasting an Instant Gearshift. this needs to happen.