Overcome Your Fears

Hello sweet friends~

Today I'll go over Chapter 8 of The Success Principles Workbook which I've been using as a motivator to achieve my biggest life goal, which is to empower women as a #KoreanAmerican #DomesticViolenceSurvivor.

The title of Chapter 8 is this: Everything You Want is on the Other Side of Fear. I learned that fear is just a feeling, albeit a negative one. Learning to move through our fears will help us to get closer to our goals.

Fear is something that has been learned. Therefore, it can be unlearned. The book breaks down the word FEAR as the following:

F - Fantasized

E - Experience

A - Appearing

R - Real

It also lists seven steps it takes to unlearn fear:

Acknowledge Fear
Feel the Fear
Stop Imagining the Negative Outcome
Use Mindfulness to Stop Imagining the Negative Outcome
Replace the Scary Image with a New Image
Use EFT or Tapping Therapy
Process the Fear

The workbook then guides me through several sets of exercises where I have to put these steps into practice. Here is an example:

Exercise 1: Write something that you are afraid or hesitant to do that are necessary for you to do in order to reach your goal.

I am afraid to reach out to new potential partners about my DV Empowerment videos.

Exercise 2: Restate it using the following format:

I want to get more paid partnerships for my empowerment videos,

and I scare myself by imagining that no one would want to partner with me in this way.

Exercise 3: Replace your imaginary negative outcomes to create mental images of the opposite positive outcomes you truly want.

I want to get more paid partnerships for my empowerment videos.

My opposite, positive image of the desired outcome is getting 100% of my videos sponsored by partners who value my work.

This is just one example - I need to do six in the workbook.

There is another exercise the book goes over, which helps me to remember how I triumphed in the face of fear:

One activity I feared doing, which I did, and it turned out well, is:

I had to speak about my domestic violence experience in Korean on the spot to 100+ grandparents. It was something I thought would be impossible to do, but I did it, and some of the audience members were moved to tears.

The book asks me to write a total of five instances where I overcame fear.

The chapter ends with a big push for me to take a bold action today, something that will get me closer to achieving my goals.

The bold action I will take is: reach out to big potential sponsors

I will complete it by: end of 2020.

In the back/journal part of the workbook, I'm assigned a Daily Evening Review (oops!). I was supposed to take several minutes to further strengthen my resolve regarding fear. I was supposed to close my eyes, take a few deep breaths and ask myself where fear showed up in my life today. Once I recalled the incidents, I was supposed to reimagine them with me taking the desire actions and having the success I want. It's supposed to help me to build my inner confidence.

In all honesty, I forgot to do this last part, but I have still been doing my mirror exercise from chapter 6!! I've been telling myself of all the positive things I've done that day and ending with "I love you." It's been getting less weird, haha~

I'm noticing that a lot of these daily exercises are mental. The book claims that my body can't tell the difference between a real event and an imagined one, so these are supposed to help trick my body into believing I'm experiencing the successes in life I want in the future.

After about two months of going through this workbook, I feel like my enthusiasm for it is dying off a bit. I'm starting to feel a bit bombarded with tasks rather than inspired by the lessons. But I'm also reminding myself to keep an open mind. Despite my skepticism, the book is still keeping me more motivated than if I didn't have it. So, it's with this mindset that I keep marching forward. Have a great week!

Love,

Christine