Are you freaking out? You cannot will or wish your fears away. See your fears in multi-colors and in 3-D. And measure up to the heroes and idols you have been worshipping.
Exercise: Uncovering Emotions
We cannot always identify our emotions directly. Then we need to invite our on-conscious to participate!
In the early days of my career, I provided talking therapies to my clients. Most of my work was within what you'd traditionally think of as therapy, talking to people about how they felt and their experiences, and using psychological explanations, diagnoses, labels and cognitive models to support the work. And I still find these useful today. But I have realized there's another well of resources available to us in finding real, sustainable solutions for dealing with emotions. This is using the wisdom of your own body and mind, especially your imagination.
Over years of coaching and counselling conversations, I've found going beyond reason and rationality, tapping into the imagination, to be a powerful complement to traditional talking therapies. The imagination gives us little nuggets of wisdom that come in the form of images and stories about what is going on for us. They can add useful layers to our understanding, give us some clues about what is hiding inside. So as much as you want to 'fix' your feelings and transform immediately, sometimes giving a little bit of space to the imagination is useful.
Bringing images into play might take a little longer than using labels or words to try to see and describe your fear. But it is also much richer and offers us many more insights. It's the kind of 'seeing' that you add to bit by bit, the way a piece of art gets created, in layers. And I've found that slower change with these more vivid insights is better, the kind of change that lasts.
Below, I'm going to explain what using images looks like, and the stories in chapters 14 to 20 will bring it to life for you too. There is no work I do now that doesn't have this at the root of it.
You might associate your imagination with creating fear - the imagination running wild, an overactive imagination. Which might explain why it's been ignored or underused. But it's equally powerful as a way of understanding. As author Deepak Chopra wrote, 'The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety.'
Fear is an energy, and if we try to use only words to articulate it, it can lose some of what we want to express, like pouring it into a jar that is too small: a lot of the meaning will run down the sides. The words we might choose often come from other people too, whereas images are more likely to be just your own.
When you use an image, it's vivid and comes from your soul. It lets you get a little closer to the experience of fear itself, nestled in your unconscious.
"Fear Less : How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself"
Unfair Hero-worship
More specifically, as entrepreneurs in the tech industry, believing in the tech genius is a death sentence to our dreams. By believing, we are dismissing ourselves. Every token of credit, every gesture of goodwill, and every unit of measurement that we transfer over to the tech genius is a transaction on a balance sheet. It's a credit on their side, but it's also a debit on our side.
In believing, we entrepreneurs seek the protagonist of our stories outside of ourselves. We are literally outsourcing our own founding myth. Instead of our hands on the clay, we motion for another to come in and perform a work of wonder. Instead of fiddling on the keys and working the melody out, trying every possible combination, we forge our very own Mozart letter. We eat a meal, take a walk, and wait around for a bolt from the blue to overtake us. We're waiting for Odin's fire to fall from the sky and entrance us with power. It's a farce -- a travesty. Why do we do this?
"Average Joe: Be the Silicon Valley Tech Genius," page.376
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