Hello, and welcome to finally facing fear. So this is an express kind of mini course, to help you have a look at your fears, understand them better so that they don't get in the way from you achieving the great things that you'd like to do in your life. So I would like to this course in general, this mini course to be as expressive as possible and kind of get right down to the point explaining the tools, concepts, ideas that might help you confront your fears. And so with that idea, I want to just jump right into the first session, which is going to be all about understanding fear as a concept as an idea as an emotion. So to do that, the first thing I want to talk about is risk. So oftentimes, we don't confront our fears because we think the outcome is too risky.

We think that the thing that we're going to do might leave us in a bit bad situation because the risks are just too high. And with this idea, I want to just present to you a definition given by Tim Ferriss about what risk even is. So Tim Ferriss is like this modern entrepreneur, blogger, writer, everything guy. And in his professional life he would have had, he's had to confront a lot of risk, a lot of fears. And he's even done talks and chats and courses on on risk and fear and all these different things. And he defines risk as the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome.

So if we use that definition, to define risk, a lot of the things that we're scared of no longer are risky. Because oftentimes, almost all the time, in fact, can negative outcomes be reversible. Can we find different ways to get ourselves out of negative situations negative outcomes And so risk can only be classified when the negative outcomes are irreversible. They're unchangeable, which is almost never. So I wanted to present this idea to kind of kick off this course. So we can start changing the chip in our minds about what is worth confronting fears about what what might bring us what might the outcomes be.

And I think this is a really great place to start changing how we define fear, so we become more comfortable with confronting it. Next, we are going to have a look at the difference between creed courage and fearlessness. fearlessness is like this trendy word that just gets thrown around by Beyonce and whoever else to talk about how great and powerful and amazing person is often associated with women with really powerful women. And I think it's a shame that we're using this word, as opposed to courageous because I think it takes away a lot of the merit, that somebody who is doing very courageous things deserves. Because the distinguishing factor between courage and fearlessness is the presence of fear, an emotion that is inevitably going to be part of our lives. So the base idea of fearlessness is impossible, because no one is without fears.

We all coexist with fear. We all feel them. We all we might feel them in different circumstances, we might feel them in different ways. They might have different impacts on us. But we all experience fear. It is something that lives within all of us.

So this idea of fearlessness is a bit of a scam. It's a bit of a lie, because we all have fears. We are born with fears. There are things that we go through in our lives that generate fear within us. That is not what the problem is. The problem is learning how to overcome fear.

And this is a, this is where courage is acquired. So you only become courageous if fear is present fear needs to be present to become courageous. And the more often you confront fear, the more courageous you'll be. And the more courageous to be, the more comfortable you'll feel, confronting fear. And so, the importance of this distinction is so that we can see that fearlessness is unrealistic and unachievable, but the courageousness is not about not having fear and just being blindly bold about doing anything. It's about consciously recognizing that fear is present and still doing something in spite of that, or, in fact, even using fear to push us forward.

So with that in mind, I want to continue to this image so I think describes this whole context really well. Oftentimes, we don't strive for our biggest dreams, our wildest ideas and things that we most want out of life. Because our comfort zone is just far too comfortable. It's easy, safe, we don't have to risk anything. Nothing It feels like within that zone, nothing bad is gonna happen to us. But the unfortunate thing is that although nothing bad may happen to us or may not, nothing excellent will really even happen to us from there either.

But if we push ourselves out of the comfort zone, and over the wall of fear, there is a possibility for unlimited potential. But in order to get there, we first have to get out of that zone of comfort, overcome the wall and then get to the other side. But what lie on the other side will be much more definitely worth the hassle and the trouble And the effort that would have been required to get out of the comfort zone and over the year, unlimited things can be achieved your biggest wildest dreams, your biggest ideas, the things that you most push you forward and like most, fire you up and fill you with passion, they can only be achieved on the other side of fear. And so we have to get become more comfortable with learning to coexist with fear at our side. Like I was just saying, everybody has fear, even some of the most famous people in the world, the people that you look up to the most in the world, your idols, superstars, everybody has fears.

And so I thought I would just go through a list of a few people I find quite inspiring, just so that we can better understand that even they had beers and the fears not only didn't stop them, but the fears helped propel them. So start with Gandhi. So he used to have stage fright. And he easily could have let that stop him from sharing his ideas and sharing the message of peace and of love. But he didn't. He slowly overcame that fear by focusing on the message that he wanted to share.

So his the message of peace and love that he wanted to share was this unlimited potential. This was on the other side of fear. So he by focusing in on that, he was able to push himself out of his comfort zone over the fear and coexist with that fear because he public speaking was at the base of what he, he did. And so, fear needed to be accepted as part of that journey. And similarly with Malala. She's a one young Pakistani woman who was shot at one point by the Taliban for promoting Women's Rights women, girls education.

And easily could she have have allowed that situation to stop her from ever taking part in more protests and more activism and more fighting to help women acquire these rights. But she did. She confronted her fear because what was more important to her was helping girls acquire an education. And she used that goal to help propel her past her fears. And then finally, Adele, the singer also had stage fright. That doesn't stop her from going on stage night after night, and using her voice and giving her sharing part of her and her power that lies within her.

Instead, she allows that to be part of her experience. She overcomes the wall and lets that fear coexist with her as she shares her voice. So the Kind of whole idea behind this whole mini Express first session is to start trying to normalize fear, normalize its existence, accepting that it's part of our journeys. Everybody has fear in their lives, even if they say that say that they don't. They do. Fear is a reality, the more we can accept that, the more we can allow for it to be there and acknowledge that it's going to be there, the more we're in a good place to be able to come to overcome it, or to pack it up and bring it along for the ride.

So in the next session, we'll kind of start taking a deeper dive into our own specific fears. Before this session, it's all about just accepting that fear is reality of life. So do that and I'll see you in the next session.