One Small Mental Shift to Help You Overcome Your Fear of Taking Action

There’s a scene in The Lord of the Rings where a character named Boromir fiddles with a ring in his hand and wonders: “It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.”

While the plot revolves around the mission to destroy this one mighty evil “ring of power” that bears so much burden onto its carrier, the thoughts uttered above hold a weight of their own in real life—especially when it comes to us falling victims to fear and not taking action against what we genuinely desire.

You want to build yourself a business, but you’re too afraid to invest your money into it. You want to write and share your ideas online, but you’re too afraid of external judgment. You want to travel the world, but you’re too afraid of doing it alone.

So what happens next? You allow that fear to anchor you down and restrain you from taking even one small step forward in the direction of your goals.

I say this because it’s true; because I felt all those feelings long before I took my first steps in faith. I suffered, as you do, “so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.”

In Letters From a Stoic, first-century Stoic Philosopher Seneca wrote:

“There are more things… likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

Since ancient times, humans have struggled with fear and doubt. Fast forward centuries onward, and today, we continue to suffer because we entertain the wrong side of our imagination.

We fall into the rabbit hole and engage with—and cling onto—irrational thoughts, so much so that we end up believing that something is far worse than it actually is. In psychology and cognitive behavioural therapy, this phenomenon is referred to as “catastrophizing.”

The problem is, as we continue to imagine the worst—to catastrophize the future—we begin to perceive our imagination as our reality. We end up shackling ourselves in our place and thus rendering ourselves incapable of taking action to face our overly-exaggerated fears.

But hold on just yet, there is a way around this.

There is one small mental shift, a way to defeat that fear, and it begins with a realization that fear is void of the past or the present—fear is nothing more than a deceptive creation that lives in the future.

Fear As Seen Through The Rear-View Mirror

What am I afraid of?

Do you ever stop to ask yourself that question?

If you did, you would arrive at the realization that fear lives in the future—that while the feeling of being afraid is real and evident today, the fear itself is an illusion because the very thought you fear is not something that has even happened yet.

And as you did dig deeper, you would realize that what you actually fear is the imaginary event or outcome that might happen in the future, not the action that you must face in this present moment.

Your fear of investing your money into your business is rooted in the projected fear of what might happen in the future: failure and bankruptcy. Your fear of launching your blog and starting to write in public is rooted in the projected fear of what might happen in the future: the scrutiny and judgment from others. Your fear of applying to that job or MBA program is rooted in the projected fear of what might happen in the future: rejection.

But have you stopped to consider that, most of the time, you have no guarantee or evidence to say that the outcome you so dreadfully fear is going to even happen?

Even if it does, who said it’s going to be that bad or scary?

It was Albert Einstein who once said that:

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

We are so deeply wrapped up in our self-constructed mental stories that we now cling onto beliefs without questioning what is true and what is false. What is make-belief and what is reality. In the words above, Einstein reminds us that what we experience in life is a projection of the thoughts we entertain—our reality is merely a perception, an illusion.

Hence what we choose to focus on expands to shape the reality we experience. And as we continue to think the same way (fearing an imaginary outcome in the future), so do we continue to experience the same emotions (feeling afraid in the present moment).

So how do we defeat fear?

We view it from the rearview mirror.

As Jen Sincero writes in You Are a Badass:

"No matter how intimidating your next great leap forward seems at the moment, it will be a pipsqueak when you look back on it someday. So why wait? Why not look at it through pipsqueak colored glasses right now? Envision your challenges from the future, look back on them from a place of victory, and they will lose much of their power to paralyze you."

Take a moment to look back and think about some radical things you once did, long ago in the past, and remember how it paralyzed you with fear.

Now, retrace your gaze back to the present moment. How terrifying and scary does this same thought feel now? Can you conjure up the same emotions of hesitation and doubt? Or is it something you reflect on and realize how little significance it bears?

And doesn’t that same event that you dreaded years ago, now gift you with the experience, courage, and wisdom to repeat it with ease and do it 10x better?

Here’s what I want you to realize: We build events up in our heads and feed them to become some of the most terrifying things we would ever do in our lives, and that stops us from taking any action toward them. But if you stop for a second to step out of that jar, you will be able to read the label for what it is: Fear is a falsified construction of the mind. Face it with this perspective—this truth—and fear will lose its power over you.

The Mental Shift: Once You Take The First Small Step, Everything Else Becomes Easier

Once you accept fear for what it is, an imaginary projection—an illusion that only arises as a form of resistance to something you’re genuinely interested in—you’re now in the driver’s seat and in control of your destiny. And this is where the mental shift that would help you overcome the fear of taking action comes in.

It’s simple:

Take the first small step forward, and everything else becomes easier.

I speak from experience: Once I overcame the fear of quitting my job, quitting the next one became so much easier. Once I overcame the fear of investing my money to start my own business, starting the next one has now become so much easier. Once I overcame the fear of writing online and published my first article, writing the next one became so much easier.

What I dreadfully feared once has now become another natural step along the way.

Why does this happen?

Because the first time you finally muster the courage to take action toward what you fear, you size down that fear from the illusionary mountain that it is perceived to be to a small stone by your feet. And as you continue to repeat that same action over and over again, you continue to trim that fear into a weightless pebble.

In the words of Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich:

“Fear can be effectively cured by forced repetition of acts of courage.”

So what are you afraid of? Take one small step against it. And then another. And another. In time, your fear will diminish, and your faith will grow.

Yes, the first step is the hardest, but each subsequent one that follows becomes a little easier… Years later you will look back and think “this wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it to be… It’s strange that I suffered so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.”

What Matters to You

In Letters From a Stoic, Seneca continued with his explanation of imaginary fear:

“The mind at times fashions for itself false shapes of evil when there are no signs that point to any evil; it twists into the worst construction some word of doubtful meaning… Some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”

Stop catastrophizing.

Stop assuming the worst and squandering your emotional and mental energies. Stop imagining and exaggerating what might be, and start accepting what is and watering what good can come from the action you take. Be prudent and cautious, but never hesitant or inactive because when you don’t take any action, you will fail by default.

Perhaps it’s best to end with another piece of wisdom from The Lord of The Rings:

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Decide not to be riddled by fear. Decide not to waste the time that has been gifted to you. Decide to take action and make things happen so you don’t look back in regret.