Fear Is Running Your Life. Here's How To Break Free - Erwin McManus

You said you've limited your impact in the world because of a lack of self-belief. Tell me the story then.

Mm. Well, y- you know, I think when I was young, I had the view that some people were just naturally heroic, and some people were just naturally born cowards, and I fell into that category. Uh, you know, if I look back when I was young, I was afraid of everything, and some of it was experiential. Uh, you know, my... W- we got attacked by a dog, so I was afraid by... uh, you know, I was terrified by dogs all my life. I- we- I had a seatbelt break on a roller coaster and almost flew off the, the, uh, the roller coaster, and so I was afraid of, of roller coasters or anything fast. And, and I began realizing that I began accumulating fear. And the problem with fear is that it doesn't stay in a category. It, it, it permeates throughout your, your whole soul, your psychological well-being. And I began realizing that I was more defined by fear than I was by almost any other emotion, and I... And I didn't really have a strategy. We didn't have what we have today, so many ways of accessing insight and ways of understanding mental structures and mind shifts. But, so I had to make my own decision. I had to decide how would I affect this, how would I change this? And so I developed a strategy to use fear as my, um, my life compass. Whenever I felt fear, I just moved toward it. Whenever I felt afraid of something, I actually moved more aggressively in that direction, and what I discovered by the time I'd finished my 20s is that, uh, there were actually international magazines and documentaries that were flying in to see what I was doing because they felt I was fearless. And I thought, "This is so ironic that I was being defined as someone who was fearless." And in fact my, my favorite superhero is Daredevil, the man without fear, and it was because I iconically longed to become that person because I knew how my whole life was captured by fear. And so I learned how to take negative material and turn it into a positive asset, and I think that, for me, is the key, is that I- I've lived a pretty adventurous life, traveled to nearly 100 countries, gone to some most dangerous places in the world, you know, walked the streets of Damascus, you know, dropped into, uh, Pakistan and, and, uh, throughout the Middle East, different parts of the world that, uh, very few people ever go to and very few people ever survive. And one of the most interesting things for me is that in those moments, I, I didn't feel captured by fear at all, and a huge part of that was because I'd learned how to take this emotion, this experience called fear, turned it into a positive fuel and used it as a way to motivate me to move forward in life.