Free Yourself from Fears (15 page)

Skill for freedom

Exploring limiting beliefs

1 What do you want to achieve? Write this down as a positive goal.

2 What could stop you? Make a list of all the reasons you might not achieve your goal.

3 Look at these reasons.Take them all as statements of belief, not fact.What is the most important and biggest obstacle to achievement in this list?

4 The first step toward overcoming a limiting belief is to put it into words—this separates you from it. So express it as a statement about yourself. Do you believe it? Maybe just a little?

5 Ask yourself these questions about this belief: J How certain are you on a scale of 1–10 of this belief?

J Have you always believed this? (Of course not, you were not born with this belief, so what changed your mind?) J What experiences have you had where this was not so?

J How would your life be different if you did not believe this?

6 What would you prefer to believe?

Say what you would prefer to believe. Make this positive, not just a negation of the limiting belief. (For example, if the limiting belief is “I am too weak to achieve this goal,” then the positive belief might be “I am strong enough to achieve this goal,” not “I am not too weak to achieve this goal.”

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7 What is the first thing you would do if that positive belief were true?

8 Do it and see what happens!

Failure and feedback

One of the NLP presuppositions states that there is no failure, only feedback.

“Failure” is a judgment—it means that you got a certain result that you did not want to get. People “fail” many times before finally “succeeding.” But they might not have ultimately succeeded without the lessons they learned from their failures. A failure could simply be a necessary step on the way to success.

“Feedback” is the results you get so that you can learn from them.

Failure is judged to be bad. Feedback is useful.

There are many examples of people using feedback to succeed.

Stephen King is one of the world’s bestselling novelists. He has sold over 300 million books and has amassed $200 million. Before he had published a single book he worked at a laundromat as a janitor, and then as an English teacher at a school in Maine. He was not well paid. He used all his spare time to write, but publishers rejected all his efforts. One day, annoyed by yet another rejection, he threw the manuscript he was working on into the wastebin. His wife Tabitha pulled it out and told him to keep trying. The manuscript was called
Carrie
. It was eventually published under that title, was hugely successful, and was later made into a film.

Mozart was one of the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived, yet the Emperor Ferdinand told him that his opera
The Marriage of
Figaro
was “far too noisy” and contained “far too many notes.” Albert Einstein, one of the greatest thinkers of modern times, was told by his Munich schoolmaster that he would never amount to much.

Successful people are willing to fail, over and over if necessary until they succeed. When you think it takes over 1,000 hours of study to become good at any skill, you can see that those 1,000 hours are 115

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bound to have their difficult moments. You will go through the phase of conscious incompetence—you know enough to know that you are not very good. Ignorance may be bliss, but incompetence is painful.

It can be humiliating. Yet you have to persevere, you have to be wiling to fail many times on the way to success.

Fear of failure

Fear of failure is an unreal fear and there are several ways to deal with it. You can use the relaxation exercise on page 212 to calm fear of failure. Also, fear of failure means fear of loss: an important value is being challenged or you would not care whether you failed or not. So you can also use the transforming fear through values exercise on page 203. You need to discover what mental pictures you are making of failure and then change them, together with the words you are saying to yourself. Finally, mentally rehearse what you want to happen.

When you think about failure you are programming your brain to fail. We bring into reality what we think about.

Here is the main NLP pattern to deal with fear of failure in any context.

Skill for freedom

From fear of failure to action

1 Acknowledge your fear. Relax and breathe freely.You have not failed.

Nothing is decided yet.

2 Think about your goal. How are you imagining it? What mental pictures do you have? Look carefully. If you are not aware of any pictures, guess what might be there. It could be you ashamed and humiliated, with “Failure” painted in big letters across your brow.

You are right to be afraid of this happening. But it hasn’t.

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3 Look at your imaginary pictures. If you are associated, then dissociate. Once you dissociate, you will lose most of the fear, it just becomes a scary movie (or even a comedy).

4 Experiment with the qualities of the picture.This will disrupt the picture and stop it having the same impact. For example, how big is the picture? Is it colored or black and white? Is it moving or still? Play with these submodalities (there is a list of visual submodalities in the resources section).

J Make the picture smaller.

J Make the picture fuzzy,

J Make the picture black and white.

J Make the picture like a still photograph.

Some or all of these changes will lessen the impact of the picture.

5 Listen to what you are telling yourself. Listen to your inner voice. If you are not sure, guess the message you might be saying to yourself.

Here are some possibilities:

J “I am no good.”

J “I will fail.”

J “They will laugh at me.”

J “I am not good enough.”

J “I will make a mistake.”

Listen to the voice. Is it your voice? Could it be a parent or a teacher’s voice?

Now experiment with the voice tone. Change the auditory submodalities (there is a list of auditory submodalities in the resources section). Make it faster. Speed it up so much that it becomes a hyper-active Disney character. Now make the tone s-l-o-w-e-r.Then make it so slow that it becomes ridiculous. Now add some funny music. Keep distorting the voice until you can laugh at it.

What is the positive intention of the voice? What is it trying to tell you that is useful? Usually, the positive intention of the voice is to 117

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keep you safe, to stop you being ridiculed, or to make sure that you are well prepared.These are good messages. Change the words to express the positive intention and make the message a useful one.

For example, you could change “I am not good enough” to “I will be the best I can be.”

6 Be clear about your goal.What do you want to happen?

Imagine exactly what you want to happen from a dissociated point of view. See it as clearly and as vividly as you can. Stay outside the experience, watch yourself acting in the situation on a mental screen.

7 Mentally rehearse your goal.When you are satisfied, imagine stepping into the situation and mentally rehearsing (associated) exactly what you want to happen. Be there, seeing through your own eyes and enjoying the good feelings.

8 Anything else? Are there any steps you need to take to make this mental rehearsal a reality?

9 Make an action plan. An action plan is a step-by-step series of actions to attain your goal.You may have to change it as you go along, but you need to start with some structure. In particular, what is the immediate action you can take that will make success more likely?

The frightening pictures were not real. It is far better to think about what you want to happen than what you fear might happen.The first will prepare your brain for success.The second will prepare you for failure.

Both are equally realistic.

Performance anxiety

Many people are afraid of public speaking and many professional actors and musicians suffer from performance anxiety even when they have a string of fine performances behind them. Athletes also 118

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suffer before a competition. Usually, the more important the performance, the stronger the fear. Some people suffer from excruciating anxiety even at the thought of giving a small speech to a friendly audience who they may never see again.

The first step if you suffer from any sort of performance anxiety is to ask yourself the following very simple question: Do I deserve to succeed?

You deserve to succeed if you have adequately prepared. If you have not adequately prepared then your fear is giving you a very valuable message. You need to work more on your presentation. For every minute you are in the public eye, prepare for five minutes. If you do not know how to prepare, seek out someone who can teach you or a book that can give you some idea about how to organize your material.

Suppose that you have prepared. You know you deserve to succeed. Yet, the fear still gnaws at you and you cannot understand why you are afraid. You want to succeed, and you know the audience wants you to succeed. (All audiences want to be entertained; they do not want the performer to fail, and they do not want to have to go home after a bad experience, especially if they have paid for it.) Performance anxiety is fear of the future. If you are adequately prepared and still find yourself afraid of an impending performance, use the following skill that is similar to the fear of failure pattern.

Skill for freedom

Performance anxiety: From fear to action
1 Acknowledge your fear. So you are frightened.That is natural. It does not mean that you will fail or make a fool of yourself.The best performers feel frightened before performing.

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2 Relax. Breathe deeply and take twice the time to exhale as you do to inhale.

3 What are you imagining? Think about your impending performance.

What do you imagine it will be like? What mental pictures do you see? If you are not aware of any picture, guess. It could be of a sea of unfriendly faces staring at you as you forget your speech. It could be you standing looking foolish as people throw rotten fruit at you.You are right to be afraid if this happens. But it hasn’t.

4 Dissociate from the picture. See yourself in the picture. Once you dissociate, you will lose most of the fear.

5 Experiment with the qualities of the picture. Play with the submodalities by making it smaller, less clear, taking out the color and the movement (or adding a lot of color and movement). Notice which changes make you feel better.

6 Listen to your internal voice.What are you saying to yourself about the performance? Here are some possibilities: J “I am no good.”

J “People will laugh at me.”

J “I should just go home.”

J “I will look ridiculous.”

J “Who am I trying to fool?”

Experiment with the voice tone. Make it faster or slower, add music, or make it another person’s voice. Use whatever changes you can to feel better.

7 What is the positive intention of the voice? What is the useful message behind the words? The positive intention of the voice may be to stop you being ridiculed, or to make sure you are well prepared.

Change the words to express the positive intention and make the message a useful one.

8 Set your goal for the performance.What do you want to happen?

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Imagine exactly what you want to happen from a dissociated point of view. See it as clearly and as vividly as you can. Stay outside the experience; watch yourself acting in the situation.

9 Mentally rehearse your goal.When you are satisfied, imagine stepping into the situation and mentally rehearsing (associated) exactly what you want to happen. Be there, seeing through your own eyes and enjoying the good feelings.

Prescribing the symptom

There is one other interesting way of dealing with performance anxiety—deliberately exaggerating the symptom. For example, try to make yourself nervous. If you sweat, try to make yourself sweat more. If your hands are shaking, try to make them shake more. This has an interesting effect.

As you try to produce the very thing that is worrying you, it actually diminishes. A lot of the power of these symptoms comes from the effort you make to suppress them. For example, sometimes before I gave a gui-tar concert, my hands would shake a little. If I tried to stop them, then they would shake more. When I let them shake, they became steady.

Suppose that you are able to increase the symptom. This means that it is under conscious control. If you can increase it at will, then you must have some control over it and you can decrease it—by relaxing.

Another application of this principle is to admit you are nervous before a performance. By admitting it in the open, it can lose its power over you, a lot of which comes from you trying to deny that it is there. What you resist persists.

Metaphors of failure

When you think of failing, what metaphor do you use? Language gives good clues to what is happening and can also suggest the remedy. The language is a metaphor for what is happening to your physiology.

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For example, here are some common metaphors that people use to describe failing:

J Choking.

J Freezing.

J Falling apart.

J Losing.

J Blowing up.

J Going down.

J Cracking up.

J Collapsing.

What phrases come to your mind when you think of failing? All these phrases imply physical tension, so you can tackle your fear by changing the way you use your body. Language gives you a clue about changing your thinking and physiology.

You can apply the following skills at the time (during a performance or an interview or an examination, whatever the challenge you face) or before to combat the fear that might make you less successful than you deserve to be.