To get past your self-imposed limitations, you have to walk up to your fear and walk through it. I’m going to give one physical-level example here, and you can apply the gradual, step-by-step approach to fears that you have.
Let’s say that you fear expanding on your job. That fear will be very similar to the fear of sky diving. You don’t want to risk losing the job, so go sky diving. Find a way to walk up to the fear and walk through it.
You may say, “I’m afraid even to stand and look over a big cliff.”
“How afraid are you?”
You say, “I just won’t do it,” so that will be what we do: “We’re going to go up to this big cliff, 3,000 feet up, and you’re going to walk out and look out over the edge.”
You just say, “I’d rather go confront my job.”
“No, let’s confront this one—because this is the one that is the father or mother of the fear.”
So you say, “Well, what will I do? I’m so scared.”
I say, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll get a great big rope and tie it securely around your waist. We’re going to measure from a tree to three feet from the edge, and then we’re going to tie the rope securely onto this tree. No matter what you do, you will not be able to fall. You can lean out as far as you want, and you still will not be able to fall.”
In this way, we systematically desensitize you to the edge of the cliff by very slowly letting you take control of the rope. But I have control of the rope in case you freak out and let go, and I’m going to be able to hold you anyway. In other words, you’re going to be so safe.
When you get through, you may say, “That didn’t take care of the fear,” so you then have to walk up to the edge of the cliff and stand and look down. But before you do that, you have to realize that your reference point for gravity and balance is 3,000 feet because we don’t have this playback as fast as we do for being close to the ground or floor, which is a ready reference point for us. (This is why a lot of people get airsick. Their reference point is looking out the airplane window and down below.) So you want your reference point to be one where you come to the edge, you lean out, and you look down. And maybe you sway for five or ten minutes.
You say, “God, what if this rope lets go?” That’s your thought that produced the fear. It was not fear.
You say, “I feel like I’m falling.” That’s a feeling fear.
So you systematically come a little bit closer, then a little bit closer, until you’re up there and you’re doing it. At that moment, you’re still safe.
Then comes the big test: you undo the rope and drop it. But if you look out, you won’t have the fear of falling because people have “vista” already incorporated in us as a gravity pull. So we can see a vista. But to look down, we say, “Oooooohhhhhhh,” because we’re trying to put our feet on that spot down below, to maintain gravity.
So you don’t look down; you just look at your feet. (Now, if you have a big stomach, you would have to bend over a little to do that.) That is a way of coming up to the fear.
If you say, “Well, that didn’t do it for me,” we say, “Let’s find another one. How about being in a pen with a bunch of Doberman dogs?”
You go, “Oh, no,” so we say, “Fine.” And we find somebody who has Doberman dogs who only “lick people to death,” and you walk in there. We don’t put you there. You take yourself up, walk through every instance of the fear in the body, through the mind and the emotions. You walk up through it. You’re going, “Nice doggies, nice doggies. Smell, don’t bite.” You try to woo and romance the animals. Isn’t that what we do, folks? “Nice doggie, nice doggie, nice. I have a dog just like you. Yeah. You’re a good dog.”
And that dog is going, “EEEERRRRRRR,” and you’re going, “Oh, no. It’s not like my dog at all. And I’m not going in there.”
But when you get in there, the dogs come up and smell you, and then lie at your feet, and you find out that you, through your own fortitude and perseverance, have broken the fear.
The depth of fear is the depth of your energy measurement. Deep fear, deep energy. Little fear, little energy.
Baruch Bashan.