Hello, welcome back. It's Adam shore the heart guy. This is my module on resilience. Now in the last module, we looked at how to learn from your mistakes. And in this one, we're going to look at how to face your fear. Now, I've been to a few personal development workshops in my time and they'll always tell you that what fear really means is false evidence appearing real, that most of the things we fear will never actually happen.

Now, this is true of most things. We worry about rejection, we worry about this, we worry about that. Again, it all stems down to your relationship with yourself. If you're prepared to learn and grow, it won't actually matter. And what I want to talk about here is I spent a lot of time during my nursing days looking after elderly patients. You talk about Bear.

Many times they'll be in a ward, where some of them, they need masks to breathe. everywhere they go, they have to take an oxygen cylinder because they can't breathe on their own. And other than the Zimmer frames to walk because they can't walk on their own. Some of them need help cleaning up because they can't even make it to the toilet on their own. These are real fears being actualized. And quite often, they're sat there thinking about the times where they had their health where they could walk down the street independently, where they could breathe independently, where they looked a lot younger, they had their health and well being.

And so many people in that environment, they would get there they would give their life for just one day. Being your age with your mobility with your friends to live. The trouble is with humans Nature, we often don't regret things until we lose them, live with people, and suddenly they're gone, but missed them until they're gone. Your parents might be dead, but you didn't visit them for the last five years, guilt can kick in. And these are very real things that come. These are the sorts of fears that people often won't look at until they happen.

So let's discuss fear. And let's give you an example of how fear can happen and what what that can look like. Now, having worked in a psychiatric environment during my nurse training, one thing that we were told about people with fears with phobias, let's take an example. There are two ways to deal with people with phobias. One is a gentle approach, where let's say somebody's scared, they're an agoraphobic, they're scared of open spaces. Might take them a couple of steps outside their front door one day, and then let them go back in.

And they might go a bit further the next day. And then within the week they walk into the end of their path so they can get to the road. That's a gentle way to get people out of their fear zone. The other one is a bit more Indiana Jones, throw yourself in the deep end, and you either sink or swim. That's called flooding. And for some people, it may just make them pass out there may be too much for them.

But for others, it's the fastest way to get over a fair. And what would I know about this? Well, let me tell you a story. Back in the early 90s, I used to go out and work for summers in American summer camps. I've done this five times in my life. I used to love spending the summer in America working in camps, looking after kids at different ages.

You Experiencing different cultures, learning, interacting, having fun, is what I did most of. Now, I have to take you back in time now. When I was about, again 1011 years of age, I don't know how I've managed to sneak in and watch a film that I probably shouldn't have watched it was called venom. And it had Oliver region. And what it was about was this kids harmless scraps night getting mixed up with a deadly black member from the zoo, and him bringing this black member home to his house. Now Oliver Reed breaks into the house, the snake gets loose.

And there's this subplot of this deadly snake going around the house and him kidnapping the family or him holding them hostage. And the final scene, was seeing this black snake climb up his leg and bite him and that was the final scene of the film. I'm sorry if I've ruined it for you. If you're ever going to say venom, but this was, this was in my mind as 1011, I was terrified of snakes, especially black ones. Now let's fast forward 10 years. I was I was working in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, in the summer camp.

And I was looking after kids that were five to seven years old. And the evening entertainment, for this time was a snake man. It was a guy who brought in his collection of various different snakes. I was terrified. And I remember going in with the kids and sitting right at the very back row to watch this guy. And after he's shown us his huge collection of snakes, including his 13 foot, Python, I remember, oh my god, this is horrible.

And then he said to the kids, he said, right Now if you want to come down and hold a snake, I'll give you a badge. And the kids that were with me saying, Adam, we're really scared when you go down and hold a snake. Now as a 20 year old guy, I felt slightly ridiculous saying to a group of five to seven year olds, that I was scared of snakes. And of course, if I showed that I was scared of snakes, they would never go down there, and I didn't want to pass my phobia on to them. So I had this moment of male bravado, where I said, of course, I'll go down and handle a snake. And as soon as those words came out of my mouth, I started to become terrified.

I can't even tell you that hair was standing up on my arms on my back back of my neck, I was frightened. I was sweaty. I was feeling my heart rate increasing. And I waited until the guy was there at the front with this little green snake and I thought, well, green snakes, grass snakes, they're harmless. Sure. So I started walking down from the back.

And just before I got to the front of the room, somebody in the front row stood up in front of me and took the grass snake. And the snake guy said to me, wait there, Adam, be back in a second, put his hands in the box. And he lifted up in front of me, this black snake that looked exactly like the one from the film. And I cannot tell you how much terror infused my body in that moment. And I remember they're holding this snake and being frozen like a statue. But it gave my kids that I was looking after they all came down and took a snake over them.

And not only that, whilst I'm always respectful of snakes, and I would never volunteer to go and pet them. I have one as a pet myself, is significantly reduce my anxiety towards snakes as a result of that incident. And that's how facing fears and this was a real fear for me. How facing fears can help us to grow and evolve as people. So take time now and write down what are the things you're the most fearful of. And we'll have a look at that in a minute.

Okay, you've got that you've got your fears down. So you know, the sort of things. Now you can take some time now if you want to think what could I do to start taking a step in the right direction. You may want to pause the video and do that now. That's entirely your call. Now, whether you done that or not, we're going to look at another exercise.

I'm going to give you one more exercise that they get people to do at my workshop. Now we get out of this, we talked about fear, false evidence appearing real. Okay, maybe it will be real, maybe it isn't. Maybe these are real things. Maybe it's the fear that stops us from doing stupid things. So fear has its place.

And again, that's part of your emotional guidance system. It can stop you doing stupid things that keep you alive on certain occasions. But I'm going to give you an exercise now. And if you really to do this with your heart and yourself, things will start to become clearer for you. When we talk about resilience, what it is and what you can do to be more resilient. And not only that this can put your life in perspective as well.

One thing that I've looked at during my nursing days is to know that life can end quickly. And a lot of regrets come from people thinking that we have as much time as we think as we want. People go on living every day. Life's never going to end. And then when people are dead regret comes in guilt, all of the other things. So, here's an exercise for you.

If you found out now that you only had two hours to live, what would you do with that time, and why? If you take your time to put your heart and soul into this exercise, it will start to shift things that are going on in your life. So take a few minutes take longer if you want to do that exercise. If you've really done that exercise now, it will start to put things in perspective. And since you are alive and we can lighten the energy of this video a little bit now because I know I've taken this to and interestingly, contemplation or place In the next video, we're going to talk about how to be more optimistic and I look forward to seeing you in that video.