A Mason's Work

You may hear a lot of people talking about fear.

If you do self-development for any of the time, there will be a whole parade of people

that will tell you that fear is not productive or not useful.

So let's talk about that a little bit because I think there's a lot to miss if you're not

careful.

And to be clear, I think a lot of folks aren't careful about this.

Fear is super useful in what it does.

It is a psychological function that will help us essentially raise our awareness and

alert level of approaching danger.

This is useful in the event that danger is life-threatening, unless so when it's a fear that we create

on our own internally that damages and drives our behavior.

In the context of the three roughions of the ceramic legend, fear represents this whole

notion of when you're afraid it's hard to speak.

It's hard to say what it is that you need to say in order to move the conversation forward

or to get out of danger.

So when you look around the world, you'll find that one of the greatest enemies of free

speech as a concept that people will use is that they will essentially use fear to

try and control that speech.

Internally, there is very likely some things that you don't say out loud.

You won't say it to yourself.

You won't say it to the people in your life.

And so every time you essentially surrender to that fear, you are limiting your speech.

In a lot of cases, that behavior itself does create meaningful problems.

And so while I'm not trying to demonize fear as a function, it does serve a useful kind

of purpose for those of us that struggle with being fearful and having that fear drive

of our behavior in a way that is destructive, we need to have a better approach for understanding

that.

And you'll hear this as a recurring theme throughout the balance of the episodes this

week.

The very first step of any of these things is to be aware of them.

So you just notice, noticing is really the first step to all

improvement.

If you don't notice what it is you're feeling, if you don't notice the behaviors that you

undertake when you feel afraid, you're never going to be able to get in front of that.

So how does one notice these things, particularly when the emotional content of something like

fear, for example, doesn't show up and announce itself in a lot of ways, fear oftentimes

masquerades as other things.

It can masquerade is anger, it can masquerade.

Strangely enough, it can masquerade as flattery.

Fear hides itself in a lot of ways where it gets sort of re-expressed and reinterpreted.

So when we start noticing these things, when we begin to look at our behavior that we find

problematic, what is important is to work backwards.

So when you have an experience where you're like, hey, I'm not sure that that was in my

best interest, right?

If you're doing that level of sort of meta-analysis, you want to work backwards from the behavior

itself and try and figure out why.

Why did this happen?

What were the things that occurred before this?

How did I feel before I acted this way?

Now if you're not somebody who does reflection well, one of the things that works for this

is sometimes just a simple count.

You might just count the number of times today.

Think back, hey, how many times today did I feel angry and was that anger a result of

being fearful?

Or how many times did I have a feeling where I didn't have a good name for it?

I don't know exactly what it was I was feeling, but man, I really don't want to do that again,

whatever that might be.

So as you go through this process and you begin noticing, you will need to sort of set

aside time for that initially when you're not familiar with it.

Don't know how to do it.

This doesn't mean you have to light the candle and sit in a special position or sit down

with a journal and pour your heart out.

It does mean you just need to stop and take a minute and think and reflect on the behaviors

that you had in that given day.

Again fear because of what it does creates this very rarely does it express itself in its

own language.

It expresses itself in other ways.

It uses essentially the sort of cognitive toolkit or the emotional toolkit to essentially

change its form in a way that is really, really quite subversive.

So if you're struggling with being afraid, step one is to create some space on a daily

basis for you to think about what's going on, what is making you afraid.

How is that showing up?

What behavior are you expressing that fear in the form of?

Is your fear manifesting itself as anxiety?

Are you then eating that anxiety with foods that's not good for you?

That's a problem in line.

So as you work through this, as you spend the time investing in yourself, create space

for some of this reflection.

And I think you'll find you're able to start identifying, minimally identifying which

villain you are currently being assaulted by.